More Bad News for NVIDIA. With Board Planning to Boot Jensen Huang, Sam Altman Reveals Master Plan to Stop Buying Their Chips

Detailed summary

Nvidia fell 7.9% after hours to $160.03 as the Wall Street Journal reported its board is preparing to oust Jensen Huang. The same day, Sam Altman's remarks to Samsung executives laid out OpenAI's plan: vertically integrated infrastructure cheaper than anyone's, including chips it designs itself, which means paying Nvidia less over time.

Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) had enough to deal with on Wednesday night. The Wall Street Journal reported at 5:27 PM ET that its board is preparing to oust CEO Jensen Huang and could meet as soon as Wednesday, hours after a New York Times report that Huang had a relationship with Nvidia executive Kimberly Powell. Nvidia has not commented. The same day, its biggest customer laid out a long-term plan that runs through Nvidia's profit margin.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told about 50 presidents of Samsung companies that OpenAI's edge will come from owning the whole stack. Asked whether heavy spending was squeezing returns, Altman said "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 Q&A materials from the October 31 meeting obtained by Korea's Financial News and published Wednesday. The article says OpenAI's investments in efficiency, including chips it designs itself, are starting to pay off.

Many successful investors eventually reach the same moment. The saving is done, the portfolio is built, and the question quietly changes from how much can I grow this to how much can I take out? Get that second question wrong and decades of good investing can come apart in a handful of years.

Read plainly, that is a plan to stop paying Nvidia's prices. Nvidia sells the most expensive layer of AI infrastructure at some of the widest margins in the industry. A customer whose strategy is to run that infrastructure cheaper than anyone else has to replace that layer with its own over the medium to long term.

Nvidia was at $160.03 in after-hours trading at 7:15 PM ET, down 7.9% from Wednesday's close, 14.3% below the November 6 close and 33.1% below its October 6 record close.

OpenAI has been building toward this for a year. In 2025 it signed a letter of intent with Nvidia for 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems, with Nvidia planning to invest up to…

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