Hey Income Traders,
Boards don’t usually remove a founder overnight. Jensen Huang spent 33 years building Nvidia (NVDA) into a $4 trillion company, and the board forced him out before its own investigation even wrapped up. An affair alone rarely moves a board that fast.
The public record already goes further. Nvidia described his dealings with Alice Huang as ordinary customer contact until he admitted the affair. Its general counsel also contacted the Commerce official who oversees export controls (the rules on which chips can ship where) about her detention in Singapore.
Then Bloomberg found roughly 50,000 chips missing from the counts Nvidia gave Washington. And Friday morning, Reuters mapped more than $3 billion of Chinese data-center projects built around H100s, a chip the U.S. bans from China.
None of it proves Huang knew. The next few weeks will show whether this stays a governance story (a fight over who runs the company and how) or turns into something worse.
Listen for the Lawyers
The first test comes Tuesday, November 17th. Nvidia reports earnings after the close, and Colette Kress runs her first call as interim CEO.
A beat won’t tell you much. I’ll be listening for new language on export compliance, for how management talks about its strategic investments and customer backstops, and for whether guidance holds up without its chief salesman.
Wednesday, November 18th brings the company all-hands. Talent worries me more than any single quarter, and I’ll be watching for senior engineers heading out.
Friday, November 20th is monthly options expiration, three days after the print. Heavy open interest (lots of option contracts still on the books) plus a leadership vacuum can mean pins (the stock sticks to a big strike price) and air pockets (sudden drops with no buyers underneath). Give the expected move (how far options traders think the stock will swing) room in both directions.
Then on Tuesday, December 1st, the story moves to Capitol Hill. The House Foreign Affairs Committee has asked Huang, general counsel Tim Teter and Commerce Under Secretary Jeffrey Kessler to appear. Watch the Teter-Kessler exchange: that’s where we find out who knew what.
Prosecutors Don’t Post Schedules
The heaviest catalysts don’t have a date yet. The Justice Department has a criminal case going on Megaspeed, and a former acting U.S. Attorney is running the board’s own investigation.
If charges name Nvidia employees, a governance scandal turns into enterprise risk (a threat to the business itself).
Who Writes the Insurance Now?
Nvidia has become the backstop for the entire AI buildout. It guarantees capacity to neoclouds (newer cloud companies that rent out AI chips), sets utilization floors (promises to cover capacity customers don’t use) and offers credit support to help them borrow.
In options terms, Nvidia’s been selling a put (insurance that pays the buyer when things go wrong) to the whole industry. An interim CEO staring down Congress and a prosecutor-led review probably won’t sign new ones.
The old guarantees stay on the books, but don’t expect fresh ones for a while.
When the market’s biggest put seller steps back, the weakest borrowers pay more for protection, so keep an eye on what those smaller AI cloud names pay to raise money.
Here for a good time… AND a long time,
Hans