Nvidia shares continued to plunge in pre-market trading on Wall Street on Thursday, down around 8%. The shares had closed Wednesday’s regular session up 2.9%, before falling 8% in after-hours trading following reports of another affair involving chief executive Jensen Huang, this time with a senior executive at the chip giant. If that decline holds when trading opens on Thursday, more than $350 billion will be wiped off the company’s market value within a matter of hours.

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The reversal in after-hours trading followed two reports published in quick succession. First, The New York Times reported that Huang had had an affair with Kimberly Powell, the company’s vice-president of healthcare, who reports directly to him. Both are married to other people.

According to the report, the pair were seen being affectionate with one another at a hotel in San Jose, California, during the company’s annual developers’ conference in March, and a passer-by recorded the encounter. Huang’s security team offered the person who filmed it a non-disclosure agreement to sign. Nvidia and Powell did not respond to requests for comment. Huang himself, according to the report, told the newspaper’s reporter, “I don’t think you should be speaking to me directly,” and hung up.

Minutes later, The Wall Street Journal reported that the board was preparing to remove Huang. CNBC confirmed that the board was meeting to decide whether to dismiss him. Some directors support appointing chief financial officer Colette Kress as interim chief executive if Huang is removed, while Bloomberg reported that the board was working with an external search firm to find a replacement. As recently as Tuesday, Nvidia had said Huang would continue to lead the company “without interruption”.

The plunge adds to this week’s sharp losses. Before after-hours trading, the shares were already down 7% for the week and heading for a sixth consecutive week of declines. Markets are already pricing in the possibility of Huang’s removal.

“The market is starting to price in Nvidia without its founder as the likely scenario, rather than a marginal risk,” said Armina Rosenberg of Minotaur Capital, which holds the shares. “Losing Jensen would be a real blow.”

Analyst Stacy Rasgon wrote that “Nvidia is not an ordinary company, and Jensen is not an ordinary chief executive — he is Nvidia”, adding that “the main beneficiary of his removal as Nvidia’s chief executive would clearly be China”.

Huang, 63, founded the company and has been its chief executive since 1993. He owns around 3.6% of its shares and has no obvious successor. Under the company’s bylaws, a majority of the board can remove him “with or without cause”.

The affair is also widening in Washington. Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren and Chris Coons asked the Commerce Department, the State Department and the White House to preserve all documents relating to Nvidia’s chip exports to China and the affair. John Moolenaar, chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, said that if Huang did not comply with a request to appear at a closed hearing, “there will probably be subpoenas”. President Donald Trump said this week that he believed Huang: “I think he’ll be fine.” Nvidia’s quarterly results are due on 17 November.

The impact extended beyond Nvidia’s own shares. Nasdaq 100 futures fell around 1% overnight, while S&P 500 futures dropped 0.4%. The semiconductor exchange-traded fund fell around 2%.

Not all shares moved in the same direction. AMD and Broadcom, Nvidia’s rivals in artificial intelligence chips, rose around 4% and 3% respectively in after-hours trading as investors shifted towards alternatives. By contrast, CoreWeave and Nebius, major Nvidia customers that rent out computing power based on its chips, were among the steepest fallers in the Nasdaq 100.

Nvidia’s weighting in the broad market indices means that any movement in its shares affects the market as a whole. According to Bryce Coward, chief investment officer at Meridian Wealth Management, Nvidia accounted for around 6.3% of the S&P 500 at the end of October. “Most Americans own Nvidia, whether they intended to or not,” he said.

Analyst Dan Ives warned that if Huang were removed, the company could lose up to 30% of its value, “with a significant negative knock-on effect on the technology industry and the artificial intelligence revolution”. Gene Munster, managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management, said that in a founder-led company without a clear second-in-command, “it’s a recipe for a 20% correction”.