Global AI stocks sink as Nvidia crisis deepens sector selloff
Scandal around CEO Jensen Huang’s affairs pose fresh risk to sector already reeling from funding and regulatory concerns
AI-linked companies fell on Thursday as a deepening scandal around Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s affairs threaten to upend the chipmaker’s leadership, posing fresh risks to the sector already reeling under funding and regulatory concerns.
As the centrepiece of the AI ecosystem, the chipmaker finances infrastructure built around its chips – a strategy that has drawn scrutiny over circular funding and now risks weighing on the sector as its crisis deepens.
AI stocks have struggled after the Democrats swept the midterm elections, including in states opposed to new data centres, stoking fears that tighter regulation could slow the AI infrastructure build-out.
Nvidia’s NVDA-Q shares fell 7.8 per cent in premarket trading and put its market value on course to drop below US$4-trillion for the first time since July 2025 amid reports that the board was deciding whether to oust Huang.
Nvidia-backed neocloud firms CoreWeave CRWV-Q dropped 6 per cent after surging more than 27 per cent in the previous session when its earnings ignited a relief rally in AI stocks.
Other neocloud stocks including IREN IREN-Q and Applied Digital APLD-Q were also trading lower. Nebius NBIS-Q fell 10.7 per cent after reporting third-quarter results.
Nvidia has lost about US$300-billion in market value since the board announced an investigation on Sunday into Huang’s relationship with a businesswoman called Alice Huang, who is alleged to be a Chinese spy.
“He’s the face of Nvidia and Nvidia has been front and centre of the AI build-out,” said Jun Bei Liu, lead portfolio manager at Ten Cap.
“And if we look at how many new cloud data centre businesses have been sponsored in this circular financing world, it’s pretty much all by Nvidia. And so it has quite a meaningful ramification for what is to come.”
Memory chipmaker Micron Technology MU-Q fell 3.4 per cent and data storage firms Sandisk SNDK-Q and Western Digital WDC-Q eased 5.1 per cent and 3.2 per cent. Photonic product makers Lumentum LITE-Q and Coherent COHR-N and AI server maker Dell DELL-N eased between 3.3% and 4.1 per cent.
Chip-related companies Marvell Technology MRVL-Q, Intel INTC-Q, Arm Holdings ARM-Q and Texas Instruments TXN-Q dipped between 1.3 per cent and 2.5 per cent.
Shares of AMD AMD-Q and Broadcom AVGO-Q, which also produce AI chips and compete with Nvidia, however, rose 1.7 per cent and 0.8 per cent, respectively, on expectations that the turmoil at Nvidia could create opportunity for rivals.
Tech-heavy stock markets across the globe witnessed jitters. Japan and South Korea closed nearly 0.7 per cent lower. Tech stocks in Europe were also down about 1 per cent.
Nvidia short sellers have made about US$3.8-billion in paper profits as of last close, and with the share price falling to US$163, those gains can swell to about US$6.8-billion, according to data analytics firm ORTEX.
Nvidia trades at about 12 times its 12-month forward earnings estimates, its lowest since November 2012, according to data compiled by LSEG.