Nvidia co-founder and longtime CEO Jensen Huang stepped down Thursday after two separate extramarital affairs became public, capping a weeks-long slide that has erased roughly $1.7 trillion in market capitalization from the chip giant since early October.
The board named finance chief Colette Kress as interim CEO while it conducts a search for a full-time successor, the company said.
Nvidia shares fell 13% this week — the steepest single-week drop since April 2025 — and have now posted six consecutive weekly losses, the longest such streak since 2012. The stock has shed approximately 30% of its value during that run, pushing the company's market cap below that of Apple.
The sequence of disclosures began over the weekend, when Huang sent a letter to employees apologizing for being "unfaithful to my wife." The board convened late Wednesday after The New York Times reported on a second affair, this one involving the company's vice president of health care. By early Thursday morning, Huang — who had led Nvidia for 33 years and emerged as one of President Donald Trump's top allies in the corporate world — was out.
"With the unfortunate departure of CEO Jensen Huang we expect a challenging transition for NVIDIA over the next few months," Gil Luria, an analyst at D.A. Davidson, wrote in a report Thursday. Luria lowered his price target to $200 from $300 but maintained his buy rating, adding, "We believe the market has appropriately adjusted for this transition."
Analysts at Oppenheimer struck a more cautious tone. Even though they see the company reporting solid earnings, "we expect fundamentals to take a backseat near term," they wrote Thursday. "The departure of Mr. Huang could, in our view, translate to a lingering share overhang."
The leadership change arrives at a delicate moment. Nvidia is scheduled to report quarterly results on Tuesday. Analysts are projecting 91% year-over-year revenue growth to $108.9 billion, according to LSEG — a figure that would represent an 18-fold increase from the same quarter in 2022, just before OpenAI launched ChatGPT and triggered the generative AI buildout.
The stock's decline began before the Huang disclosures, reflecting broader pressures on the AI trade. Much of last week's roughly 9% drop came in the wake of midterm elections that produced sweeping Democratic victories and the passage of ballot measures analysts said could slow artificial intelligence infrastructure spending. Rising interest rates had also weighed on the sector in the weeks prior, with concerns centering on debt-heavy neoclouds that are among Nvidia's largest customers.
The transition now falls to Kress, whose immediate task is steadying investor sentiment ahead of earnings. How the board frames the CEO search — and whether it can project stability around Nvidia's product roadmap and customer relationships — is likely to shape the stock's trajectory in the weeks ahead.
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