Nvidia Corp.'s leadership crisis is lifting shares of potential winners, with Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Broadcom Inc. and Alphabet Inc. all advancing after hours on speculation they could capture business from the chip giant.

AMD and Broadcom each climbed more than 3%, while Nvidia tumbled 9% in after-hours trading following reports that its board is preparing to remove Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang, who had steered the company to briefly become the world's most valuable firm. Alphabet added 0.3% in extended trading.

The decline came after reports about Huang's extramarital affairs and deepened when the Wall Street Journal said the board was getting ready to oust him. Nvidia is working with an outside firm to identify possible successors to Huang.

As Nvidia grapples with leadership uncertainty, rival hardware makers are rising as investors look to maintain exposure to the AI trade while hedging Nvidia-related risks. The upheaval highlights the potential for further volatility as investors weigh its effect on AI development and the degree to which customers diversify their spending globally.

"This is where competitors like AMD, like Google Tensor Processing Units and Amazon will probably have a chance to improve their market share when it comes to that accelerator market that Nvidia dominates," said Mandeep Singh, global head of technology research at Bloomberg Intelligence. "There is no doubt that Nvidia won't be as aggressive as they have been in the past two to three years when it comes to setting goals and overachieving them."

Huang's potential replacement will likely be "quite conservative" in leading the company, given the recent developments, he added.

Head-to-Head Competitors

AMD and Broadcom stand to gain the most if Nvidia's leadership problems disrupt its customer relationships. AMD is Nvidia's closest rival in AI graphics processing units and is striving to loosen its grip on the market, while Broadcom has a growing role in custom AI chips and networking.

While a Nvidia leadership shakeup may push customers to reconsider their reliance on a single supplier, competitors like AMD and Broadcom are already pursuing business in AI accelerators, custom silicon and networking.

"AMD as a direct competitor, and Alphabet and Broadcom in the TPU space, are natural beneficiaries in the short term," said Anna Wu, an investment strategist and founder of Floodlines Research. "Huang's scandal has raised public doubts about Nvidia's commercial secrets and its product edge."

Alphabet's TPUs are custom-built for AI, while graphics processing units are multi-purpose chips originally made for gaming. TPUs cannot replace GPUs across the board, and moving AI workloads away from Nvidia is slow and costly, she added.

Alphabet announced this week plans to roll out a broader array of AI chips, aiming to capitalize on its rapid rise as a major challenger to Nvidia in a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars. The company is introducing two new variations of its TPUs.

Chip Partners of Hyperscalers

Other beneficiaries include the companies powering hyperscalers' in-house chips.

In Taipei, MediaTek Inc., which works with Google on custom silicon, rose as much as 3.3% on Thursday. Design houses Alchip Technologies Ltd. and Global Unichip Corp. both jumped more than 8% in Taipei on hopes that rising budgets will flow into custom hardware.

Nvidia's manufacturing partners appear largely insulated from the turmoil, given they also supply its rivals. But Samsung Electronics Co. may have more to gain if the uncertainty at Nvidia leads to a shake-up in supplier relationships. Samsung outperformed memory rival SK Hynix Inc. by more than one percentage point, while Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. was little changed.

Samsung has forged increasingly close ties with AMD, Nvidia's biggest challenger in AI chips, while SK Hynix remains Nvidia's primary supplier of high-bandwidth memory. During AMD Chief Executive Officer Lisa Su's visit to Seoul in March, Samsung agreed to collaborate with the US chipmaker on next-generation AI memory and computing technologies.

"A potential leadership change at Nvidia could create a strategic opening for Samsung," said Jung In Yun, chief executive officer at Fibonacci Asset Management Global. "If Jensen Huang were to leave, new management could reassess supplier relationships and place greater emphasis on diversifying its supply chain, giving Samsung an opportunity to deepen its partnership with Nvidia."

Beyond the memory giants, a number of South Korean startups — including AI chipmaker FuriosaAI and Samsung-backed MangoBoost — are also seeking to chip away at Nvidia's dominance with alternative technologies.

Chinese Alternatives

The scandal could also benefit Chinese companies working to replace Nvidia in their home market, as stricter export rules in the US intensify scrutiny of chip sales to China.

Any resulting tightening would provide a tailwind for local chipmakers such as Cambricon Technologies Corp., Hygon Information Technology Co. and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp.

Cambricon jumped as much as 13%, while Hygon and SMIC both climbed more than 5%.

China's tech selloff began much earlier than in the US, and investors may be eyeing cheap Chinese tech stocks as a potential hedge if the US market downturn worsens, Wu said.

"But structurally, unless Chinese tech found a fix for advanced chips, I'd say it is difficult to penetrate Nvidia's market share," she said.