Nvidia shares fall as board weighs ousting Jensen Huang after probe into his personal conduct

Nvidia's stock slid more than 8% in after-hours trading on Wednesday, to $159.51, after word spread that the company's board is weighing whether to remove Jensen Huang, the chipmaker's co-founder and chief executive. The Wall Street Journal was first to report that board members were preparing for his removal. Sources told CBS News the Trump administration knows about the board's plans.

The drop added to a steep slide. Nvidia's market value has fallen by more than $450 billion since Nov. 8, the day the company announced an investigation into Huang's conduct.

The backdrop is a message Huang sent employees on Sunday, in which he admitted to an affair and apologized to his wife and their two children, both of whom work at Nvidia. "There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry," he wrote.

The matter extends beyond the personal. U.S. intelligence agencies have linked Huang to Alice Huang, a Chinese business executive who is no relation to him and is suspected of being an asset of China's Ministry of State Security. She was a senior executive at a Singapore-based company that has been one of Nvidia's largest foreign customers, buying large quantities of its chips and other advanced hardware. President Trump said this week that the FBI is also investigating the romantic and business ties between the two.

Corporate governance experts say the alleged relationship appears to violate Nvidia's code of conduct. The policy warns that personal relationships can create conflicts of interest for the company, and Huang himself states in it that employees are responsible for maintaining high ethical standards. It also tells workers to ask whether they could defend an action if it became public on social media or known to colleagues. If they could not, it says, "do not proceed."

Nvidia's board has 11 members, Huang among them. According to a regulatory filing, the other members are designated as independent.

Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and is seen in many circles as the face of the artificial intelligence boom, since the company's advanced chips supply the computing power behind frontier AI models. Wall Street analysts say the company has no obvious successor. Adam Crisafulli of Vital Knowledge called the news obviously negative, describing Huang as arguably the most prominent executive at the most prominent company in the world's most important industry, someone who foresaw AI's rise years before ChatGPT arrived and prepared his firm for it.

Dan Ives of Yorkville Ives wrote that Huang cannot be replaced by another CEO or a group of interim executives, but that Nvidia likely must now move on without him. Before Sunday afternoon, he said, that prospect would have seemed like a Twilight Zone episode. Investors, Ives said, will now weigh who might succeed Huang, how that could change the company's near-term strategy, and what the government investigations may turn up.

Congress is paying attention as well. Lawmakers are expected to question Nvidia executives about whether its chips are being funneled to China through other countries. The board's decision, a successor, and how far those inquiries reach are the things to watch next.