On November 12, NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) announced that Jensen Huang had resigned from his roles as president, CEO, and director, effective immediately.
After U.S. markets opened that day, NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) shares plunged more than 14% at one point, touching a low of $148.8, down nearly 40% from their October high, and the company's intraday market value briefly evaporated by more than $600 billion.
The founder's departure was the most direct trigger for this selloff—the market was not merely reacting to a single risk, but repricing the entire company.
At the same time, as an AI computing leader sees its valuation fall to historic lows even while demand remains strong, discussion about whether to buy the dip is heating up.
And if one shifts attention away from this management shake-up, it becomes clear that the real questions NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) now needs to answer may also include valuation, moat, and whether demand has undergone irreversible change.
The selloff triggered by Jensen Huang's resignation has pushed NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA)'s valuation to a rare level: about 12 times forward PE, the lowest for the company's stock in fifteen years.
Over the same period, the S&P 500's expected price-to-earnings ratio was about 18 times.
In other words, after a governance crisis, NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA)'s valuation has become cheaper than the broader U.S. stock market.
This valuation level corresponds to a business that remains strong.
In fiscal 2026 (ending January 2026), NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) reported revenue of $215.9 billion, up 65% year over year, with data center revenue reaching $62.3 billion in a single quarter and gross margin maintained at around 75%.
In the second quarter of fiscal 2027, revenue was $96.2 billion, data center revenue was $89 billion, up 117% year over year, operating margin was 66.2%, and free cash flow reached $21.3 billion.
Although several investment banks cut their price targets for NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) after the Jensen Huang event, most still maintained buy or overweight ratings.
Barclays lowered its target price from $275 to $210, maintaining overweight, and explicitly said it was "cutting the valuation multiple by about 25% to reflect reputational and transition risks over the coming months," with the current share price implying potential upside of about 20.9%.
Goldman Sachs maintained buy, cutting its target from $300 to $220; Citi cut from $285 to $225, also maintaining buy; RBC cut from $330 to $230.
Truist was one of the few institutions to downgrade directly from "buy" to "hold," slashing its target to $174, almost exactly where the stock is trading now.
Clearly, the institutional consensus is: the business is not broken, but the multiple assigned to the business needs to be reset.
And a 12 times forward PE has already completed that reset to a considerable extent.
The main support behind this comes from the fact that the long-term demand narrative has not yet been falsified.
At GTC 2026, Jensen Huang predicted that by 2027, demand for AI chips for Blackwell and Rubin systems would reach at least $1 trillion, directly doubling his previous forecast of $500 billion for 2026.
Anthropic's latest disclosed annual recurring revenue (ARR) is also still growing, and total AI capital expenditure forecasts have not been revised down because of short-term volatility—only the slope of spending is being shifted later.
However, cheap valuation does not mean risk has disappeared.
The risks NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) currently faces may be more fundamental than "who becomes CEO."
First, CUDA's lock-in effect is being eroded from the inference side.
The reason CUDA is a moat is mainly that moving models from NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) GPUs to other chip architectures is costly.
But Anthropic disclosed a landmark development in its IPO roadshow: its model Claude Mythos Preview took only three days, with essentially no human intervention, to autonomously complete the porting of core GPU kernels, enabling Claude to run key inference steps on AMD's flagship GPU.
Silicon Valley investor Marcelo P. Lima's comment has been widely cited: "NVIDIA's CUDA moat no longer exists."
That comment may be partly exaggerated, but the direction of the trend is clear: as large models themselves begin to possess the ability to rewrite system software, the migration costs previously built on human engineering labor are being rapidly flattened by automation—CUDA will not collapse overnight, but its shift from "everyone must use it" to "still needed on the training side, not necessary on the inference side" is already happening.
Second, NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA)'s supply bottleneck is not in wafers, but in HBM and packaging.
Industry data show that TSMC can cut more than 400 million GPU dies a year, but NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA)'s actual annual shipments are only about 10 million units.
The real constraint is HBM: global annual HBM capacity is about 3.75EB, NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) can get about 70% of it, and each GPU needs an average of 260GB, which in total can support only about 10 million GPUs.
At the same time, packaging capacity is also tight, and HBM4 supply adjustments have already made it possible that Rubin's mass production schedule will be delayed.
This means that even if demand were infinite, NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA)'s shipments are constrained in the medium term by a physical ceiling, not by its design capability or customer orders.
Beyond that, most importantly, what Jensen Huang left to NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) was not only organizational assets such as CUDA and architectural accumulation, but also three highly personalized things: strategic judgment on technology direction, the ability to negotiate supply chains with TSMC and SK Hynix, and direct channels of dialogue with customers and governments.
Interim CEO Colette Kress is a familiar face to capital markets and has long served as CFO, but who will make the final calls on NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA)'s product roadmap and who will maintain supply chain relationships have no answers before a formal successor is in place.
This means that after "de-Jensen Huang," NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA)'s share price is unlikely to collapse, but the premium the market was willing to pay for Jensen Huang will not automatically transfer to his successor.
Therefore, if opportunity and risk are viewed together, NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA)'s current position may be summed up in one sentence: the business is still there, but the "faith premium" assigned to the business is being systematically stripped away.
Admittedly, a 12 times forward PE has already digested a considerable degree of pessimistic expectations.
If the long-term direction of AI capital expenditure remains unchanged, demand for Blackwell and Rubin is realized, and the successor can stabilize supply chain and customer relationships, then the current price offers an entry window with decent odds.
The buy ratings and potential upside of more than 20% from Barclays, Goldman Sachs, and Citi reflect exactly that judgment.
But "cheap" itself is still hard to justify as a sufficient reason to buy.
The loosening of CUDA's lock-in effect is a structural change that occurs slowly over years but whose direction is hard to reverse.
On the supply side, the physical bottlenecks in HBM and packaging limit the revenue ceiling NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) can realize when demand surges.
And the uncertainty around the successor means the stripping of the "founder premium" may not be over yet.
Bernstein said bluntly in its latest research report: "If you see two ants in the kitchen, the total number of ants in the kitchen is definitely more than two."
It pointed to a possible chain of developments: from personal scandal, to governance vacuum and business news, to government investigations, each link triggering a new round of selling.
And each eruption in that chain brings NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA)'s valuation one step closer from a "Jensen Huang premium" to an "ordinary semiconductor company premium."
Undoubtedly, what the market fears most is never bad news itself, but not knowing when and in what form the bad news will appear.
Before everything settles, "how much is NVIDIA worth without Jensen Huang" remains an open question.
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