Closing Time: Nvidia’s first day without Jensen
CNBC reports Nvidia shares finished down about 4% on Thursday after plunging more than 13% at the open and briefly slipping below $4 trillion in market value.
Good afternoon. For the first time since 1993, Nvidia went through a full trading day with someone other than Jensen Huang in charge, and the market spent the whole session trying to decide what that is worth.
Nvidia shares finished down about 4% on Thursday after plunging more than 13% at the open and briefly slipping below $4 trillion in market value, CNBC reports. Finance chief Colette Kress is now interim CEO and will keep the CFO job while the board searches inside and outside the company for a permanent successor.
Individual investors treated the drop as a sale. In the first 30 minutes of trading, retail buyers put a net $111 million into Nvidia, the biggest opening bid Vanda Research has ever recorded and more than 40 times a normal open, according to the same CNBC report. Wall Street was less eager, with at least 10 analysts turning more bearish this week.
Nvidia’s rivals moved the other way. AMD and Broadcom each gained about 6%, while Kress and longtime Nvidia engineer Ian Buck have emerged as the names investors are watching for the top job, Reuters reports.
The leadership change may matter as much in Washington as in Santa Clara. Huang was the industry’s loudest advocate for selling chips to China and a close ally of President Trump, so his exit could reshape export policy along with the org chart. Trump weighed in on the succession himself today, saying former Apple chief Tim Cook should take over Nvidia, Axios reports.
The Wire
The latest headlines from our live AI news feed.
Microsoft 365 outage knocks out Outlook, Teams and Copilot, breaking OpenAI and Anthropic connectors — The Independent
SpaceX plans more than $74 billion in AI supercomputing campuses in Texas and Arizona — Bloomberg
Advocacy groups sue OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and SpaceXSI to freeze frontier AI development — AP
OpenAI raises $15 billion at a $1.25 trillion valuation, CNBC reports — CNBC
OpenAI closed a smaller round than it set out to raise. The company raised $15 billion at a $1.25 trillion valuation, half of the $30 billion it first sought and below the $1.4 trillion price it had pitched, CNBC’s David Faber reported. Even so, the valuation sits about 47% above where OpenAI priced its March round.
SpaceX is putting rocket-company money behind AI compute. It plans to spend more than $74 billion on two supercomputing campuses, about $24 billion at Starbase in Texas and roughly $50 billion in Cochise County, Arizona, Bloomberg reports. The Texas site will run on its own gas-fired power plant, while the Arizona campus still needs county approval and faces a public hearing in December.
A coalition of advocacy groups went to court to stop the frontier race outright. Public Citizen and three other nonprofits sued Anthropic, Google, Meta, OpenAI and SpaceX’s AI unit in San Francisco, asking a judge to freeze development of the most advanced models under California’s unfair competition law, the Associated Press reports. The suit leans heavily on the companies’ own executives, who have warned the technology could cause catastrophic harm.
Markets
Biggest winners
| Ticker | Name | Price | Day |
|---|---|---|---|
| AMD | AMD | 585.30 | +5.86% |
| AVGO | Broadcom | 364.36 | +5.54% |
| ANET | Arista | 206.77 | +5.13% |
| CLS | Celestica | 254.15 | +4.62% |
| CEG | Constellation Energy | 282.40 | +2.79% |
Biggest losers
| Ticker | Name | Price | Day |
|---|---|---|---|
| NBIS | Nebius | 128.64 | -16.84% |
| SMCI | Super Micro | 26.99 | -11.30% |
| BBAI | BigBear.ai | 2.08 | -9.78% |
| IONQ | IonQ | 30.84 | -9.45% |
| SOUN | SoundHound | 3.60 | -7.93% |
Prices are from Thursday’s U.S. trading session, November 12, 2026, versus Wednesday’s close.