An opportunity to buy Nvidia at these levels would have been a dream for many investors not long ago. Now, they may want to proceed with more caution. Nvidia shares were down 2% in early trading Friday. On Thursday, the stock fell more than 4% — though it closed well off its session lows — after Jensen Huang resigned from his post as CEO. News of Huang’s extramarital affairs has pushed the stock down 13% this week. If that pullback holds through Friday’s close, it will be Nvidia’s worst weekly performance since April 2025. Buying the dip here seems like the natural reaction to such a sharp correction. After all, investors in recent years have been rewarded for scooping up shares following pullbacks. This time, it’s different, according to Truist analyst William Stein. “It’s not just about ex-CEO Jensen Huang’s affairs or his resignation, but also about the potential that NVDA’s culture becomes impaired, and that the company may have shipped GPUs that became accessible to companies and government entities in China, challenging future revenue performance,” Stein wrote to clients late Thursday. NVDA 5D mountain Nvidia 5-day chart Indeed, Bloomberg News reported , citing documents, that a company founded by Alice Huang — the alleged Chinese spy who reportedly had an affair with the ex-Nvidia CEO — had obtained smuggled artificial intelligence chips used in a Shanghai data center with ties to Megaspeed. “In our view, this makes NVDA’s investment risks too great to forecast revenue or earnings with enough confidence to continue our Buy rating,” the analyst said. Stein downgraded Nvidia to hold from buy. He also slashed his price target to $174 from $346, implying just 4.7% upside from Thursday’s close. Nvidia’s scandal could also revive a U.S. push to curb semiconductor exports to China ahead of a summit between Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping next week. “The export control implications could prove more consequential than the leadership change itself,” wrote JPMorgan credit analyst Erica Spear. “Following last week’s blue wave, we expect a more challenging oversight environment when the new Congress takes office in January, with greater pressure to examine both NVIDIA’s engagement with the Trump administration and the enforcement of existing restrictions.”
