Nvidia shares fell for a third straight session Friday, closing at $162.85, as Wall Street kept digesting the most abrupt leadership change in the chipmaker's 32-year history. The stock has shed nearly 9 percent since Monday and now trades more than a third below the $243.37 high it touched earlier this year, according to trading data compiled by Yahoo Finance.
The slide capped a week in which Nvidia's board accepted the resignation of Jensen Huang as president, chief executive and director, effective immediately, and installed longtime finance chief Colette Kress as interim CEO while it searches for a permanent replacement. Harvey Jones, a board member since 1993 and the former chief executive of Synopsys, was named the board's first-ever chair.
A week of whiplash
The sequence began Wednesday, when shares fell 8.2 percent in after-hours trading following a Wall Street Journal report that the board was preparing to remove Huang over allegations, later detailed by the New York Times, that he had been the target of a Chinese intelligence effort tied to a personal relationship. That drop briefly erased more than $300 billion in market value, according to an analysis by stockanalysis.com.
By Thursday, the board had made it official in a regulatory filing confirming Huang's resignation, Kress's appointment and Jones's new role as chair. Nvidia's statement included an unusually direct note from its independent directors, who said they had "no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised." Huang, in a message to staff reported by stockanalysis.com, struck a different tone: "There is no excuse for what I did."
Using the roughly 24.1 billion shares Nvidia has outstanding, Friday's close points to a market capitalization near $3.9 trillion, down from the roughly $5.7 trillion the company was worth as recently as early October — though only part of that decline traces to this week's news. Chip stocks broadly have been under pressure since a historic rout on Nov. 5, when the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell more than 10 percent in its worst single session since March 2020, wiping out more than $1 trillion in sector value as investors reassessed how quickly artificial-intelligence spending will pay off, per 247wallst's account of that selloff.
Friday's broader session underscored the divide investors are drawing between AI-exposed technology stocks and the rest of the market. The Nasdaq Composite closed at 25,136.27, down about 0.9 percent on the day and nearly 2 percent for the week, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average edged up to 52,347.55, essentially flat on the week as money rotated toward industrial and value names. The S&P 500 closed at 7,561.67, down roughly 0.4 percent Friday.
Analysts have been split on how much of Nvidia's slide is governance risk and how much is a broader correction in AI-related valuations that was already under way before the Huang story broke. The company has given no public account of how, or whether, the two forces interact, and it has not identified any internal or external candidates for the permanent CEO search.
For now, Kress — a 13-year Nvidia veteran who spent nearly 25 years in finance roles at Cisco and Microsoft before joining the company — is trying to project continuity. "NVIDIA's strength has always come from its people," she said in the company's statement announcing her appointment, adding that "our focus remains on serving our customers, partners, developers and shareholders."
What investors are watching next
The test of that message comes fast. Nvidia is still scheduled to report third-quarter fiscal 2027 results after the close on Tuesday, Nov. 17, with Kress now running both the earnings call and the company itself. Investors will be watching for any sign that the leadership turmoil has affected customer orders, data-center demand or the chip giant's relationships with major cloud partners — or whether, as the board insists, the business keeps running as it always has, Jensen Huang or not.
