Jensen Huang Basically Lit More Than $1 Trillion on Fire in Less Than a Month

WIRED tallies the damage: Nvidia was worth around $5.2 trillion when the scandal surfaced in late October, and in the weeks since it has shed more than $1 trillion in market value. On the morning the resignation was announced, roughly $546 billion vanished within about an hour of the open, before a partial rebound.

This matters well beyond Nvidia shareholders. WIRED notes Nvidia's chips train roughly 90 percent of frontier AI models, and the company holds large stakes across tech, including nearly $30 billion in Intel stock and roughly $21 billion in SpaceX stock as of an August filing. When the center of the AI supply chain wobbles, the whole stack feels it.

The number is staggering, but the lesson is old. Markets priced Nvidia as if its founder were part of the product. WIRED quotes a think-tank fellow calling him irreplaceable, and investors clearly agreed. That is a governance failure in plain sight. A company this central to the global economy should never have been this exposed to one person's judgment, and the earlier reporting that there was no succession plan makes the sell-off look less like panic and more like a reckoning.

We would be careful not to confuse market value with the actual business, though. Nvidia's chips did not get worse this month. The data centers already ordered are still being built, and the engineering bench did not resign. Some of this drop is a risk premium on leadership, legal exposure and export-control questions tied to the Megaspeed affair. That premium can shrink if the company shows steady management and comes clean on the China questions. It can grow if more comes out.

The winners are already visible. WIRED reports AMD shares up 28 percent over five days and Broadcom up nearly 16 percent. For the AI industry, a credible second and third supplier is healthy. Concentration around a single chip vendor has been a quiet risk for years, and if this episode pushes labs and clouds to diversify, that is a lasting good outcome from an ugly story.

The harm is real too. Huang personally owned about 3.5 percent of the company, and WIRED estimates his own stake lost more than $50 billion. But the bigger losses sit with ordinary investors, index funds and retirement accounts that hold Nvidia as one of the largest companies on the market. I'm watching whether this becomes a prolonged slide, which WIRED says is the early consensus, or a reset.

The scandal began with a New York Times report on Huang's close relationship with Alice Huang, a former executive at Singapore-based chip buyer Megaspeed and an alleged asset of China's Ministry of State Security. The two are not known to be related. Nvidia opened an investigation on November 8 after he acknowledged an affair, and further affairs have since been reported, with WIRED counting three as of its latest update. Colette Kress is interim CEO.