Nvidia Probes Hit Six After Huang Exit as SMCI Sinks 11%

The Nvidia investigation count reached six by lunchtime on Thursday, the day Jensen Huang resigned: three at the Justice Department, the board’s own and two in Congress. The shares have stopped reacting. Nvidia traded at $164.72 at 12:58 p.m. Eastern, down 5.2%, after two hours inside a three-dollar range, while Super Micro Computer fell 11.6%.

That split is the tell. Equity desks are pricing legal risk into the supply chain, where prosecutors brought smuggling charges in March, and not into Nvidia, where no charge has been reported. The succession market prices the same risk as time. Polymarket’s contract on a permanent chief being named by 31 December has fallen from even odds at 10:11 a.m. to about 35%, on this desk’s readings of the public order book.

The six Nvidia investigation fronts

• Justice Department, antitrust. One probe is “focused specifically on the chipmaker”, Semafor reported, citing two administration officials.
• Justice Department, Megaspeed and Supermicro. Two further inquiries focus on those companies and on the role of Alice Huang, the businesswoman US officials suspect of spying for China, Semafor said. Bloomberg reported that prosecutors in the Southern District of New York are examining whether organisations tied to her diverted Super Micro hardware to China, according to CNBC.
• The board. Directors hired Wachtell Lipton on Tuesday to investigate the intelligence allegations, CNBC reported.
• House committees. Huang “has agreed to come” and will testify before Thanksgiving, Foreign Affairs chair Brian Mast told reporters. The session is likely to be under oath and transcribed.
• Congressional Democrats. Senator Ron Wyden and Representative Richard Neal opened an inquiry into the administration’s approval of H200 chip exports to China, in a letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

The limits matter as much as the list. Semafor said there is “no indication that the DOJ would seek to charge Nvidia, or Huang, criminally at this time”, and that neither Nvidia nor the department commented. China has denied the spying allegations, NBC News reported.

Civil claims and the company’s line

The resignation itself changes the civil exposure. It “demonstrates the seriousness of the underlying allegations, and will strengthen any shareholder claims regarding damages, the importance of any misrepresentations, and Huang’s likely knowledge of the truth,” Ann Lipton, a corporate law professor at the University of Colorado, told CNBC by e-mail. Rosen Law Firm, which filed a proposed class action, said “several hundreds of investors” had contacted it. Our earlier report on the investor lawsuit against Huang has the claims.

Nvidia’s public position is continuity. Interim chief Colette Kress told staff in an e-mail obtained by CNBC that the company will hold a meeting on 18 November, the day after fiscal third-quarter results. “The Board takes seriously our duty as stewards of this great company,” chair Harvey Jones wrote in his own note.

What desks should watch

For brokers and risk desks the calendar matters more than the count. Results land on 17 November. Huang’s testimony is due before 26 November. In January, control of both chambers passes to Democrats who are already investigating, so the subpoena power changes hands with the files still open. Server makers are being sorted by exposure: Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise were up about 1% while Super Micro sank, CNBC data showed. Earlier coverage: retail’s record dip buying, the House subpoena threat and the resignation.

Expect the docket, not the product roadmap, to set the news flow into year-end. The flat tape says investors read these as slow processes, and for now Semafor’s reporting supports them. The risk is the first document that turns a probe into a finding: a charging decision in New York, the Wachtell report or sworn testimony that contradicts a filing. Until one arrives, Super Micro is where the market will express the fear.