Reporting snapshot · 12 November 2026 (Asia/Karachi). Nvidia had not announced any decision when this was written, and the board's own statement of 8 November still expressed confidence in Huang. Accounts of what the 11 November meeting discussed come from media citing people close to the deliberations, and Nvidia declined to comment on them.
Nvidia’s board of directors met on the night of 11 November to decide whether to remove founder and chief executive Jensen Huang, after The New York Times reported that Huang had a second extramarital relationship with a company executive who reports to him. Shares fell about 8 per cent in after-hours trading after The Wall Street Journal first reported the company was preparing to oust him, The Guardian’s live coverage reported. Including that selloff, Nvidia lost roughly $600bn in market value over the week.
KhabarWire reported on 9 November that Nvidia’s board had opened an independent investigation into Huang into reports that he had been the target of a foreign intelligence effort. What has changed is the board’s own posture. On 8 November the directors said they had “confidence in Jensen and his leadership team” and would “provide further updates as appropriate”, in a statement published by the company. Three days later they were reported to be weighing whether to remove him. The Nvidia leadership crisis hub follows the investigation and the succession question.
What the board was reported to be deciding
The 11 November meeting was described as a decision on Huang’s position rather than another stage of the inquiry. A source familiar with the matter told Reuters the board was meeting to decide whether to oust him, The Guardian reported. Al Jazeera, citing reporting from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, described the board as discussing whether to remove Huang over allegations that he had an affair with an Nvidia employee in addition to the relationship with the Chinese national accused of being recruited by Beijing’s Ministry of State Security, in its 12 November account.
Two details in that reporting are new. The first is the second relationship: the earlier allegations concerned Alice Huang, a former Megaspeed executive. The second concerns Kimberly Powell, identified by The New York Times as Nvidia’s vice president for health care, according to DW’s account, which added that Huang, asked about the relationship by the paper, replied “I don’t think you should be talking to me directly” before ending the call.
The board’s own advisers also changed. In a statement published on 10 November, Nvidia said the independent members of its board had retained Joon H. Kim, a former acting United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, and his firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to run the inquiry, the company said. That statement came from the independent directors alone, two days before the full board was reported to be weighing its founder’s removal.
Huang, who co-founded Nvidia in 1993, acknowledged in a message to employees on 8 November that “I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt my wife and my children. There is no excuse for what I did”, in the email the company published. He said he would cooperate with the investigation and was committed to protecting Nvidia and US national security.
The market reaction, and where the accounts differ
The size of the after-hours fall was reported differently by different outlets, and the differences track the hours in which they were writing. Al Jazeera put the drop at 8.6 per cent in after-hours trading on Wednesday; Nikkei Asia reported the shares plunged nearly 10 per cent at one point during extended trading, in its account. Asian markets on Thursday were calmer: The News International reported the Kospi up 0.2 per cent, Taiwan up 0.5 per cent and the Nikkei 225 up 0.5 per cent, while the MSCI index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan slipped 0.1 per cent.
Analysts disagreed about what a leadership change would do to the company. Dan Ives of Yorkville Ives estimated Nvidia’s value at $300 a share with Huang as chief executive and $225 without him, and Jay Goldberg of Seaport Research Partners said “Jensen is Nvidia; without him, the company loses its central, animating spirit”, Al Jazeera reported. Jake Dollarhide, chief executive of Longbow Asset Management, was more sceptical of an immediate decision: “I believe the board won’t oust him until they have an all-star, a known entity in the tech sector, to replace him.”
Nvidia’s leadership structure gives no obvious successor, and that is the problem investors are pricing. The BBC, which followed the case from the investigation’s opening, reported that Victoria Fernandez, chief market strategist at Crossmark Global Investments, had said there was “no natural successor” and that “Nvidia is the core of this AI trade, and without them, all these pieces start to fall apart because the financing’s not there.” The governance around Huang is what makes the decision possible: The Guardian noted that he holds a plain 3.6 per cent of the stock with no supercharged voting rights, and that the company has no permanent board chair.
The pressure from Washington
The board is deciding under a separate political timeline. Members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee asked Huang for a closed-door briefing, saying recent reports raise significant national security concerns regarding China’s access to sensitive US technology and information, the BBC reported on 9 November.
On Wednesday, as the board was meeting, Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren and Chris Coons asked President Donald Trump’s administration to preserve records relating to Nvidia’s chip exports to China, a request that also covers the alleged affair, DW reported. Shareholders had also filed a proposed class action against Nvidia and Huang on Monday, accusing them of concealing the relationship and its risks.
Beijing has rejected the allegations, calling them “entirely groundless, speculative and intended to smear and malign China”. The Chinese response has moved the allegation into Taiwan’s territory: Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council minister Chiu Chui-cheng said in parliament that Alice Huang visited Taiwan eight times in 2024 and 2025, entering on a Hong Kong passport as a standard business visitor with “no special flags” recorded, The Guardian reported. Chiu said the United States had advised Taiwan as early as 2024 to monitor her movements.
What is unresolved, and what it means for chip supply
Nothing in Nvidia’s own public statements confirms that the board has taken any decision, and the company did not respond to Al Jazeera’s requests for comment. Al Jazeera noted that it remains unclear whether Nvidia has a succession plan. Asian shares on Thursday were firmer than the after-hours price implied, consistent with a market that expected the board to hesitate.
The export-control consequences are harder to price than the succession. Huang has been among the loudest advocates for relaxing restrictions on high-end chip exports to China, a position that placed him at odds with national security hawks in Washington, Al Jazeera noted. A board that removes him would lose its most senior advocate on the policy question shaping which chips reach which markets, at a moment when Washington is also weighing tighter scrutiny of AI chip sales after the midterm elections. KhabarWire reported on the election’s consequences for AI and chip policy in November.
The scale of what rides on the company is why the market moved as it did. US technology companies are collectively planning to spend $750bn on AI infrastructure this year, a significant share of which is expected to go to Nvidia chips for data centres, The Guardian reported, and the chief executives of OpenAI and Anthropic have said Nvidia’s supply is key to running their models at scale. For buyers of AI hardware, including those planning capacity for Pakistan’s own data centre build-out, the practical questions are the ones investors are asking about Nvidia: who signs off on chips, on what terms, and how quickly.
What happens next
The next public step is likely a statement from Nvidia itself, which said on 8 November that it would provide updates “as appropriate” without giving a timetable. A closed-door congressional briefing would put Huang’s account of the allegations on the record without a public hearing.
Whether Huang remains chief executive is the question the 11 November meeting was convened to answer, and the market is waiting on Nvidia, not on the reports, for the answer. The investigation has no published scope, timetable or findings, and on succession planning and the terms on which the independent directors can act, nothing has changed since the board began meeting.
