Nov 12

Nov 12 Nvidia Without Jensen Huang: Is the Worst Over for the Share Price?

Foreign Affairs Forum | Dr. Antonio Bhardwaj (Dr. 🆎)| Nov 12th

FAF analysis of the short term and long term outlook after a CEO exit, a sector selloff and an earnings report five days away

Where the Share Price Stands

Nov 12th was the most violent session of Nvidia's recent run.

The stock traded between a low of $148.80 and a high of $173.30, and was priced near $164.81 with a market value of about $4.05 trillion. That low is also the 52 week low.

Wednesday's close was $173.73.

The bounce from $148.80 to the mid $160s is the recovery now being discussed, but it sits inside a larger fall.

The stock peaked at $239.24 on Oct 6, which puts the current price roughly 31% below that high.

What Changed This Week

The sequence matters.

On Nov 5th, an AI chip selloff knocked Nvidia down 9.3%, from $200.13 to $181.60.

Then the board said it was investigating whether Jensen Huang had been the target of a foreign intelligence effort. It also said it had no reason to believe Nvidia's secrets were compromised, and that it had confidence in Huang.

On Tuesday the stock fell another 5.5%, with the inquiry still open and a hotter October inflation report reviving talk of a Fed hike.

The stock rose 2.9% on Wednesday but fell about 8% in after hours trading as the board met late into the night.

The Wall Street Journal had reported that the board was preparing to oust him. Then came the announcement.

Huang resigned as President, Chief Executive Officer and a member of the board, effective immediately. Colette Kress, the CFO, was appointed interim CEO, and Harvey C. Jones became the board's first-ever Chair.

The board is searching for a permanent CEO and will consider internal and external candidates. It said operations, customer commitments and the product roadmap should continue without interruption.

Why the Market Reacted So Hard

The core issue is key person risk. Few $4 trillion companies are as tied to one founder. Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and owned roughly 3.5% of shares. He leaves after 33 years of shaping the company's strategy, customer relationships and product direction.

Per FAF analysis, the stock is now pricing three uncertainties at once.

The first is leadership, because the company has an interim CEO and no named successor.

The second is governance. The exit was abrupt, and the announcement did not describe how the earlier inquiry was resolved.

The third is macro, as renewed rate fears pressure high valuation technology stocks. China adds a fourth, smaller pressure.

Reports on Nov 4th said major Chinese AI developers expected to receive only about 1% of the advanced chips they had ordered, although Nvidia's guidance already assumes no China data center revenue.

The Nov 17th Earnings Test

The report is still on. Nvidia said it will report its quarterly results on Nov 17th as scheduled.

Guidance was $108.0 billion in revenue, plus or minus 2%, with a gross margin of 74.0%. Consensus sits at about $108.80 billion in revenue and $2.47 in earnings per share. The prior quarter set a high bar. Revenue was $96.2 billion, up 106% year over year, with data center revenue of $89.0 billion.

This report will be read differently from any in recent memory.

The numbers will cover a quarter that ended before the leadership crisis, so the market will focus on forward signals.

Kress, who is both CFO and interim CEO, is the natural face of the call. FAF analysis sees four items that matter most: the fourth quarter revenue guidance, the gross margin path, any timeline or criteria for naming a permanent CEO, and whether large customers reaffirm their commitments. A clean beat with calm answers on succession could stabilize the shares. Vague answers on leadership could outweigh strong numbers.

Short Term Prediction

Three levels frame the next two weeks: the $148.80 low, Wednesday's close of $173.73, and the Nov 5th close of $181.60.

The first scenario, at about 40%, is that earnings meet or beat guidance and the board signals a credible succession path.

In that case the shares would likely work back toward the $173 to $182 zone, where heavy selling emerged this week.

The second scenario, at about 35%, is that the numbers are fine but the leadership vacuum and governance questions linger. The stock would then trade in a choppy range between roughly $150 and $170, with repeated tests of the low.

The third scenario, at about 25%, is a weak outlook, customer hesitation or further executive departures. That would break below $148.80. For reference, a Trefis review of weeks like this one found that the typical path first fell another 17.0%, to about $129, before recovering. The 12 month median was +55.0%. That is a stress marker and not a forecast. These probabilities are FAF judgment calls, not statistical outputs.

On the question of whether the worst is over, the honest answer is that the first shock has passed, but the stock has not yet proven a floor. The most important unresolved variable is now leadership, not demand.

Long Term Prediction

The business case has not changed overnight. Revenue more than doubled last quarter, and the board states that the roadmap continues.

Analyst targets remain far above the current price. One aggregator lists an average 12 month target of $266.07, with a lowest target of $170 and a highest of $390. Those figures likely predate today's news and may be revised, so they should be treated with caution.

The long term outcome depends on the following:

Whether the board names a respected permanent CEO.
Whether product launches stay on schedule.
Whether large customers keep committing capital.
How competition from custom chips and rival suppliers evolves.
Whether China stays closed.

Per FAF analysis, the base case through 2030 is that Nvidia remains the leading AI computing platform but trades at a lower premium than before, because investors will price in governance and succession risk. If the successor is strong and the roadmap holds, today's drop may look like an overreaction by 2030. If leadership turmoil spreads, the discount could persist.

The outlook toward 2036 is wide, and it rests more on the company's next decade of leadership than on its last decade of results.

Dr. 🆎 Remarks

Dr. 🆎 remark: Markets forgive bad quarters faster than they forgive uncertainty about who is in charge. The next two weeks are about answering the second question.

Dr. 🆎 remark: A bounce from a panic low is not a signal. Stakeholders should wait for the earnings call and the succession plan before reading the recovery as a trend.

Conclusion

Nvidia's rebound from $148.80 to the mid $160s shows that buyers still see value, but the CEO exit means the worst cannot be declared over.

The Nov 17th report is the first real test of whether the business and the new leadership can reassure the market.

Long term, the growth engine remains strong, but the company now carries a leadership question it did not have a week ago.

This FAF article is analysis, not financial advice.

Dr. Antonio Bhardwaj

Dr. Antonio Bhardwaj is a polymath and veteran strategist whose career spans more than four decades of high-stakes leadership across business, public life, geopolitics, and scholarship.

He has served as president of two SAP consulting partner firms and has combined that operational record with long-form research at the intersection of technical infrastructure and human behavior. Twice a candidate for the United States Congress, he brings to his present work a practitioner’s understanding of electoral politics, legislative constraint, and the distance between policy design and public consent. That experience sharpens his reading of national division: campaigns expose how fiscal choices, institutional trust, and social psychology interact in real time, and how durable reform depends on legitimacy as much as on technical soundness.

At the center of his current practice is Strategic Country Assessment. Dr. Bhardwaj approaches the state as a diagnostician, applying a structured framework to the social, economic, and political conditions of nations. He joins fiscal analysis with social psychology to trace the origins of budget imbalance and civic fracture, and to propose systemic remedies aimed at economic stability and social cohesion. His congressional campaigns inform that method. They trained a habit of testing abstract models against voter realities, institutional incentives, and the limits of mandate—an outlook he now applies to country-level diagnosis and to advice on contested policy environments.

This work is extended by his engagement with computational epistemology: the formal structures through which machine systems represent claims, and the ways those representations meet human belief. He treats the present convergence of machine intelligence and global infrastructure—what he terms the Prometheus Protocol—as a problem of knowledge, governance, and risk, not merely of engineering.

His academic formation includes doctorates in Social Psychology and Theology, grounding his attention to collective belief, moral frameworks, and the unspoken drivers of institutional behavior. He is advancing further study toward a PhD in Artificial Intelligence. A foundation in mechanical engineering, international trade, and finance supplies the structural discipline he brings to military theory, national policy, and global maritime energy chokepoints. Parallel work on high-stakes initial public offerings gives him a direct view of capital formation, strategic competition, and the contests that shape technological and economic primacy.

As Editor-in-Chief of Washington Media and an advisor associated with United Nations forums, his commentary on state power, institutional capture, and the historical trajectories of Russia and the Gulf has become reference reading for observers of a multipolar order. Through his Selective Writings, he also argues for the vulnerable, pressing for the dismantling of structures that deny dignity and free choice.

Outside formal analysis, he remains attached to the rhythms of the natural world. An avid photographer of forests, waterfalls, and caverns, and a close observer of butterflies, he treats ecological interconnection as a standing corrective to purely instrumental views of policy and power. That sensibility is continuous with his life as a single parent—the commitment he regards as his most consequential—and with a public outlook formed in two congressional campaigns: that authority is justified only where it enlarges freedom, and that analysis which cannot survive contact with citizens is incomplete.

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