Five reasons why Nvidia matters – and what’s now at stake

Detailed summary

Major funds’ portfolios may be impacted while there are leadership questions to answer if Jensen Huang leaves

Major funds’ portfolios may be impacted while there are leadership questions to answer if Jensen Huang leaves

[SAN FRANCISCO] It’s not often that a revelation about a relationship erases a trillion dollars of value from the stock market. But that’s what’s happened in the wake of media reports that a woman suspected of being an asset for Chinese intelligence had grown close to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who acknowledged having an extramarital affair.

The wipeout speaks both to the chipmaker’s sheer size – at around US$4 trillion, Nvidia’s market capitalisation is comparable to the national economic output of Japan, the UK or India – and to the pivotal role of its leather-jacketed, celebrity CEO.

It was Huang’s decision to pivot Nvidia’s focus from graphics chips for gaming to the artificial intelligence “accelerators” that have made it one the world’s biggest companies by market value, and his globe-trotting lobbying has helped to maintain its dominant position.

Hence the sharp sell-off of Nvidia’s shares when the espionage scandal raised questions about his future at the company. A spokesperson for China’s government called the “so-called Chinese spy allegation” unsubstantiated.

On Nov 30, 2022, a then-little-known company called OpenAI released a chatbot called ChatGPT, triggering an explosion in demand for a type of computing chip that Nvidia was uniquely well-placed to provide. After that, Nvidia’s share price rose fourteen-fold to a peak on Oct 6.

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The company witnessed soaring demand from data-centre customers, including Alphabet, Amazon.com and Microsoft. In mid-2024, it overtook all three by market capitalisation for the first time. In 2025, Nvidia became the first company to surpass both US$4 trillion and US$5 trillion in market value.

By early October, it was closing in on the US$6 trillion mark. Since then, it’s fallen behind Apple as the world’s biggest company.

Opening of the article, excerpted from The Business Times. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.