Huang Resigns, Nvidia Loses 35% in a Day the Selloff Didn't Spread

On Wednesday, November 4, 2026, Nvidia's shares fell as much as 8% in after-hours trading — the extended session that runs once the regular stock market closes — after a report said the company's board was weighing whether to remove chief executive Jensen Huang, the man who had built Nvidia into the dominant supplier of chips used to train artificial intelligence models. By the end of the saga the board's deliberations ended in Huang's resignation, confirmed later the same day, and the stock's decline deepened to as much as 35% from where it had been trading before the story broke. The drop was large enough to also pull down Micron, a maker of the memory chips that sit alongside Nvidia's processors inside AI servers, since investors read Huang's exit as a threat to the pace of orders running through the whole AI hardware supply chain. The story itself shifted shape during the day. It started, according to an initial Wall Street Journal account, as an affair investigation into Huang's conduct, then was reframed in later reporting as a fight over who would succeed him atop Nvidia. That reframing mattered because it moved the question from a personal scandal, which markets tend to treat as a passing distraction, to a governance and succession problem, which raises doubts about strategy and continuity at a company that supplies the chips most of the AI industry depends on. A separate, fresh scare over China's chip market added to the pressure on Nvidia specifically, landing in the same session as the leadership story and compounding uncertainty about the company's near-term demand. Yet the decline did not travel far beyond Nvidia and its closest suppliers. Wall Street futures did fall overnight on the first, unconfirmed report of a possible ouster, but through the session itself the slide stayed contained, a split captured by one of the day's own headlines: Huang's resignation was confirmed, but Nvidia's selloff did not spread. That containment suggested investors were treating this as a company-specific governance event rather than a verdict on the broader AI capital-spending cycle that has driven much of the market's gains this year. That spending cycle was tested from a different angle by CoreWeave, a cloud-computing company that rents out AI-chip capacity built largely on Nvidia hardware. CoreWeave attached a concrete number to its plan to fix its balance sheet: a $4 billion loan. Its bonds have been trading at a discount to face value, and analysts split over what that discount means, some reading it as a sign of real financial strain and others as a buying opportunity, even as CoreWeave's own earnings were read elsewhere on the wire as easing, rather than deepening, broader fears about AI spending. Not every move traced back to chips. Patrizia, the German real estate investment manager, jumped 21% after a partial takeover offer at €8.20 per share surfaced, a reminder that European property dealmaking carried on regardless of the Nvidia story dominating the wire. The split between an isolated chip-sector shock and a market that otherwise held up showed in the Buy List 2026 model portfolio, the newsroom's tracked set of positions. Invested at €120,000, the portfolio was worth €124,727 by the close, a total return of +3.94% once dividends are counted, against a price-only gain of +3.25%. Inside that number, the same AI-and-crypto-adjacent risk that hit Nvidia also weighed on two of the portfolio's own positions: Tesla stood at -20.95% and the portfolio's bitcoin exposure, held as BTC-EUR, was down 14.06%, consistent with a separate wire report that bitcoin had fallen 5% over the week. Those losses were offset by a 42.02% cumulative gain in GameStop and a 25.28% gain in Iberdrola, the Spanish utility, which kept the portfolio's overall return positive even as its most tech-exposed holdings struggled. One position illustrated the lag between daily news and portfolio accounting: Strategy, the bitcoin-holding company trading as MSTR, was reported on the wire as falling after hours in today's session, yet the portfolio's running figure for that position still showed a cumulative return of +23.05%, a gap that reflects how much the stock had gained since the position was first added, before today's decline. Going into the next session, Nvidia had not yet named who would run the company after Huang, leaving open whether the board would appoint an internal successor or look outside, a decision likely to shape whether the stock's losses deepen or stabilize. Also unresolved was how far the fresh China chip scare would extend beyond sentiment into actual order numbers, and whether CoreWeave's $4 billion loan would be enough to narrow the discount on its bonds or merely delay a reckoning analysts were still disputing. Confirmation of a named successor at Nvidia, together with any update on China-related chip restrictions, would be the two events most likely to settle whether Wednesday's shock stays confined to one company or spreads into the broader AI trade.