NVIDIA board meets today to decide Huang's future
Nvidia's board of directors meets today, Wednesday 12 November, to decide whether to remove chief executive Jensen Huang from the company he co-founded and has led for more than three decades.
The meeting comes days after reports that the board was preparing to oust the 63-year-old chief executive, and after a week in which Nvidia has lost around $600 billion in market value. Nvidia, worth roughly $4 trillion, did not comment.
What the board is deciding
According to Reuters, the board is meeting today to decide whether to oust Huang. Bloomberg has reported that the board has been working with an outside firm to identify potential replacements, and that an interim chief executive is under consideration.
No successor has been confirmed. Analyst Armina Rosenberg of Minotaur Capital described chief financial officer Colette Kress as the "natural choice", but that is an analyst's view, not a board decision, and Kress has not been named as a chosen replacement.
The succession question is central to the board's deliberations. Huang has no obvious successor, and he owns about 3.6% of Nvidia's stock, a stake that makes any decision about his future unusually complicated for the board. A chief executive who is also a major shareholder, and who has led the company since its founding, cannot be removed by the same straightforward process that applies to an appointed manager. The board must weigh the leadership question against the ownership structure, the market reaction, and the absence of a confirmed replacement.
The market reaction
Shares fell about 8% in after-hours trading after The Wall Street Journal first reported that the board was preparing to oust Huang. Since the board announced its investigation earlier this week, roughly $600 billion of Nvidia's market value has been wiped out.
Monday alone brought a 4.3% fall in the shares, erasing around $190 billion, on the day a shareholder lawsuit was filed against the company. The scale of the decline reflects how closely investors associate Nvidia's value with Huang himself, and how much uncertainty the leadership question has introduced into a stock that had been valued at roughly $4 trillion.
The lawsuit
A shareholder class action was filed on Monday 9 November in federal court in San Jose: Kistenmacher v. NVIDIA Corp. et al, brought by the Rosen Law Firm.
The suit alleges that investors were misled over reports concerning Huang's personal conduct and espionage-related claims. The class period runs from 9 October 2025 to 8 November 2026.
What comes next
Two fixed dates now sit on the calendar. Nvidia reports its third-quarter results on 17 November, numbers that will land while the leadership question is still open. The following day, 18 November, three House committees are due to hold a closed-door briefing on the matter.
US President Donald Trump has publicly backed Huang, calling him an "honorable guy" who has "done an amazing job", and said the FBI is "looking into it in terms of something else."
Why it matters
Huang is not just Nvidia's chief executive. He is the public face of the artificial intelligence boom, and the architect of the company's rise to become the world's most valuable chipmaker. A board decision to remove him would be one of the most dramatic leadership changes in modern corporate history, and it would land at the exact moment the AI industry is asking how much of Nvidia's success is the company, and how much is the man.
Today's meeting will answer the first part of that question. The second part, who leads Nvidia next, and whether the company's $4 trillion valuation can hold without him, is only just beginning.
