Nvidia Falls 7.9% as Board Moves Against Huang and Altman Maps an Exit

Nvidia stock traded at $160.03 in after-hours action at 7:15 PM ET on Wednesday, down 7.9% from the day's close, 14.3% below the November 6 close and 33.1% below its October 6 record — and the same day brought two separate threats to the company. The Wall Street Journal reported at 5:27 PM ET that Nvidia's board is preparing to oust CEO Jensen Huang and could meet as soon as Wednesday. Hours earlier, The New York Times reported that Huang had a relationship with Nvidia executive Kimberly Powell. Nvidia has not commented on either report.

The second threat arrived through a channel far from Nvidia's Santa Clara headquarters. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told roughly 50 presidents of Samsung companies that OpenAI's edge will come from owning the whole stack — a strategy that, read plainly, is a plan to stop paying Nvidia's prices over the medium to long term.

The remarks come from Q&A materials from an October 31 meeting, obtained by Korea's Financial News and published Wednesday. They give the clearest statement yet of why OpenAI has spent a year diversifying its chip supply, and they landed on a night when Nvidia holders were already absorbing a governance crisis at the top of the company.

What did Altman actually say?

Asked whether heavy spending was squeezing returns, Altman answered: "that's the point." A company with "vertically integrated infrastructure that costs less than any other company's" can sell AI in huge volume at thin margins and pull ahead of the competition, according to the published materials.

One English translation of his comment circulating on X renders the logic directly: "If we can build vertically integrated infrastructure at a lower cost than anyone else, we can get ahead of the competition."

The article based on the materials says OpenAI's investments in efficiency, including chips it designs itself, are starting to pay off. That single clause carries the weight of the story. Nvidia sells the most expensive layer of AI infrastructure at some of the widest margins in the industry. A customer whose declared strategy is to run that infrastructure cheaper than anyone else has to replace that layer with its own.

How has OpenAI been building toward this?

OpenAI has been constructing the alternative for a year, through three supply deals that each shift more computing away from a single supplier:

• Nvidia, 2025: OpenAI signed a letter of intent for 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems, with Nvidia planning to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI as the systems were deployed.
• AMD, within weeks: OpenAI agreed to buy 6 gigawatts of AMD chips.
• Broadcom, the decisive step: OpenAI announced a 10-gigawatt deal to build custom accelerators of its own design, with deployment starting in the second half of 2026.

The first two deals diversify supply. The Broadcom deal moves OpenAI onto silicon it controls. Each step reduces the share of OpenAI's computing that must run through Nvidia, and the third eliminates the supplier markup on that share entirely.

Altman's remarks to Samsung explain the economics behind the sequence. Selling AI in high volumes at thin margins only works if the cost of each unit of computing keeps falling. The fastest way to cut that cost is to stop paying a supplier's premium.

Why does it land harder this week?

Altman made two other points in the same meeting that Nvidia holders will not like.

First, on demand: "there has been double-counting of demand" for AI, he said, and "only two companies, OpenAI and Anthropic, are actually driving major demand growth." A boom that rests on two buyers gives those two buyers enormous bargaining power — and one of them has now described, in its own words, a plan to need Nvidia less.

Second, Altman gave the bull case for the industry, and by extension for Nvidia's near-term sales: "In the long term, AI demand will grow enormously," he said, and the biggest limit for the next few years is "the chip supply chain and data center infrastructure." The world is still short of chips. That shortage keeps Nvidia's sales high for now.

The question for a holder, laid out in the source analysis, is what Nvidia can charge once its largest customers make their own silicon.

What does the stock damage look like?

The numbers are concrete. A holder who had $100,000 in Nvidia at the November 6 close — about 536 shares — held about $85,743 at the after-hours price, a loss of roughly $14,257 across three trading sessions and one evening.

Almost all of that decline came from the Huang scandal. The board's move against a founder-CEO who has run Nvidia since its founding is an immediate, headline-driven shock.

Altman's plan is a slower risk, and the source analysis argues it is the larger one. It goes to Nvidia's gross margin — the number to watch in every quarterly report from here — and it matters more over five years than who holds the CEO title next month.

What should holders watch now?

The practical question for a holder deciding what to do before Thursday's open, per the source, is concentration. If Nvidia is more than about 10% of a retirement portfolio, both the board's decision and OpenAI's plan land on that single position.

The tax treatment differs by account type. Trimming inside an IRA costs nothing in taxes. Trimming in a taxable account converts part of the gain into a tax bill — a fact worth knowing before selling on a night like Wednesday's.

The stakes for the market reach beyond one stock. Nvidia's margin structure has been the profit engine of the AI buildout, and its pricing power depends on customers who cannot build the most expensive layer themselves. Broadcom's custom accelerators, deploying from the second half of 2026, will test whether the largest buyers can. Until then, a chip shortage that Altman himself acknowledges keeps Nvidia's near-term revenue intact — and every gross margin figure Nvidia reports becomes the measure of how much of that pricing power survives.