Nvidia’s share price fell as much as 14 percent on Thursday morning, shortly after the company had officially announced the resignation of its president and CEO Jensen Huang. The drop temporarily shaved $600 billion off Nvidia’s market cap, putting the AI chip leader on track for the largest single-day drop in U.S. stock market history – a record that Nvidia already holds with a $593-billion drop that came in January 2025. By the end of the trading day, the company had recovered some of the losses, however, closing “just” 4.3 percent in the red with a market cap loss of $182 billion.
As our chart illustrates, it’s been a turbulent fall so far for the company that has become emblematic of the AI boom. As the leading chip supplier of AI data centers, Nvidia saw its revenue grow almost tenfold in the past three years, while the company’s stock price surged around 400 percent since the beginning of 2024. Since closing at an all-time high of $239.24 on October 6, Nvidia’s shares have tumbled 31 percent, however, erasing almost $1.8 trillion in market cap, as doubts about the viability of the AI economy were compounded by the revelations about now former CEO Jensen Huang.
Prior to his fall from grace, Huang had been one of the figureheads of the industry and one of the most vocal advocates of the potential of artificial intelligence. As the face of Nvidia, he was also the industry's loudest champion of open-source AI, arguing that open models strengthen safety and speed up innovation. His exit raises questions about how committed the company will remain to the open-model ecosystem.
