Nvidia Falls 4.3% as Jensen Huang Resigns; AMD and Broadcom Jump

Nvidia dropped 4.34% on Dec. 12 after co-founder Jensen Huang resigned as chief executive and from the board, capping 33 years at the front line of the chipmaker he built. The stock opened 13.08% lower before paring losses through the session. Rivals read the shakeup as an opening: AMD jumped 5.86% and Broadcom climbed 5.54%, against a broad market decline.

U.S. indexes fell across the board. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 52,297.09, down 189.40 points, or 0.36%. The S&P 500 ended at 7,592.40, down 26.98 points, or 0.35%. The Nasdaq Composite finished at 25,366.09, down 101.00 points, or 0.39%. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index lost 0.54%.

Nvidia announced the move just before the opening bell, naming Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress interim CEO. The pressure on Nvidia's supply chain was immediate. SK hynix, which fell 3.19%, and Micron, down 1.59%, both supply high-bandwidth memory (HBM, stacked DRAM used in AI accelerators) to Nvidia and slid with their biggest customer's uncertainty.

The downstream hit was harsher. CoreWeave, which buys Nvidia GPUs and leases out computing power, dropped 6.86%. Nebius, a similar cloud-compute operator, plunged 16.84% — losses it extended after issuing full-year revenue guidance below market expectations in its third-quarter earnings release.

Not everyone sold. Among the largest companies by market capitalization, Alphabet rose 1.79%, Tesla advanced 1.69%, Amazon added 0.48%, Microsoft gained 0.36% and SpaceX ticked up 0.14%. Apple slipped just 0.14% and Meta declined 0.82%. TSMC, Nvidia's manufacturing partner, fell 1.90%.

What does the change mean for Nvidia?

Huang's exit ends the longest-running founder-CEO tenure in semiconductors' AI era. Kress steps in as interim chief with no permanent successor named. The 13% opening gap, mostly recovered by the close, suggests investors priced leadership risk quickly but stopped short of panic. AMD's and Broadcom's gains point the other way: money moved to credible alternatives in AI silicon within hours.

Oil surge compounds the pressure

Stocks also contended with a sharp jump in crude. Expectations for U.S.-Iran talks faded after President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social: "we do not need a deal with Iran." He said he had instructed Vice President JD Vance, who led the negotiations, to focus on other work.

Brent crude for January delivery settled at $95.82 a barrel on London's ICE Futures exchange, up 3.30%. U.S. West Texas Intermediate for December closed at $88.74 on the New York Mercantile Exchange, up 2.55%.

Supply fears did the rest. Iranian military authorities said two tankers passing through unauthorized routes in the Strait of Hormuz had halted operations after explosions. Yemen's pro-Iran Houthi rebels said they attacked Saudi Arabia's east-west pipeline and oil facilities at Yanbu, on the Red Sea coast, with drones and other weapons.

Yields climb, housing sinks to a 16-year low

Bond yields rose again. The 10-year U.S. Treasury yield, the global bond-market benchmark, climbed 0.144 percentage points to 5.133%. The 30-year note, a reference for U.S. mortgage rates, and the policy-sensitive two-year note also rose.

The housing market absorbed the blow. Existing home sales fell 5.5% in October from September, to 3.75 million units, the National Association of Realtors said. Sales were down 8.8% from a year earlier — the lowest level since August 2010, a 16-year low.

Labor data stayed tight. Initial jobless claims totaled 200,000 for the week of Nov. 1-7, the Labor Department said, holding at or below 200,000 for a ninth straight week. Claims rose 9,000 from the prior week and came in slightly above the 195,000 analysts expected.

The day in one line

One founder's exit moved more money than an oil spike, a 16-year housing low and a nine-week labor streak combined. Watch Kress's first decisions — and whether AMD's 5.86% pop holds.