Nvidia Falls 7.9% as Board Weighs Ousting Huang and Altman Maps 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. The drop compounds a brutal week. Shares sit 14.3% below the November 6 close and 33.1% below the October 6 record. Two forces drove the sell-off. One is a governance crisis. The other is quieter and, arguably, more expensive.

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. The report landed hours after the New York Times disclosed a relationship between Huang and Nvidia executive Kimberly Powell. Nvidia has not commented. Silence is not a denial.

What did Sam Altman tell Samsung?

The same day, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman addressed roughly 50 presidents of Samsung companies at an October 31 meeting. Q&A materials from that session, obtained by Korea's Financial News and published Wednesday, record his logic.

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 competitors, according to the materials. OpenAI's efficiency investments, including chips it designs itself, are starting to pay off, the article said.

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

Read plainly, this 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 (vertical integration means owning every layer, from silicon to software, rather than buying from suppliers). A customer committed to running infrastructure cheaper than anyone else must eventually replace that layer with its own.

How has OpenAI built toward this?

The groundwork spans a year. The moves, in sequence:

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

Each step shifts compute away from a single supplier. The Broadcom deal moves it onto silicon OpenAI controls outright. Altman's Samsung remarks explain the sequence: thin-margin, high-volume AI sales only work if unit compute cost keeps falling, and the fastest cut is removing the supplier's markup.

Why does it land harder this week?

Altman made two further claims Nvidia holders will not welcome. He said "there has been double-counting of demand" for AI. He added that "only two companies, OpenAI and Anthropic, are actually driving major demand growth."

A boom resting on two buyers hands those buyers bargaining power, and one of them has now described a plan to need Nvidia less. Altman also gave the bull case: "In the long term, AI demand will grow enormously," with the binding constraint for the next few years being "the chip supply chain and data center infrastructure." The world remains short of chips, which supports Nvidia sales for now. The open question is what Nvidia can charge once its largest customers build their own.

What does this mean for a holder?

A holder with $100,000 in Nvidia at the November 6 close, about 536 shares, held roughly $85,743 at the after-hours price. That is a $14,257 loss across three trading sessions and one evening. Nearly all of it traces to the Huang scandal.

Altman's plan is a slower threat. It targets gross margin (revenue minus cost of goods sold, as a percentage), the figure to watch in every quarterly report from here. That risk matters more over five years than who holds the CEO title next month.

The practical question is concentration. If Nvidia exceeds about 10% of a retirement portfolio, both the board's decision and OpenAI's plan strike the same position. Trimming inside an IRA carries no tax cost. Trimming in a taxable account converts part of the gain into a tax bill, worth knowing before selling into a night like this.