By Mike Dolan
Nov 12 (Reuters) - Just when tech stocks looked to be finding their feet again, chip behemoth Nvidia plunged almost 10% overnight on reports its board may now oust troubled CEO Jensen Huang.
The board met late on Wednesday and although there has been no formal announcement yet, the Wall Street Journal reported it was about to remove him.
A potential ouster of Huang, which would set off a flurry of speculation about his replacement with no obvious succession plan in place, comes after he confessed to having an affair with a businesswoman alleged to be spying for China.
Pressure mounted further on Wednesday after the New York Times reported a second affair with a more junior Nvidia executive. Political reverberations from the allegations have also rattled the US administration.
If out-of-hours trading is confirmed after the bell today, the cumulative Nvidia share price loss this week would mean well over half a trillion dollars will have been wiped off its market cap.
It would certainly reverse the bounce in its stock and the wider tech sector on Wednesday, when data center firm CoreWeave's battered shares jumped back almost 25% on a surprising earnings beat. Stock indexes across the world are on the back foot again due to the latest Nvidia twist.
One company that won't thank Nvidia for the timing of all this volatility will be AI giant Anthropic - currently roadshowing its mega IPO amid shifting sands on its valuation.
Elsewhere, with bond markets closed for Veterans Day on Wednesday, it fell to the dollar to absorb the hot October inflation update and re-upped Federal Reserve rate hike bets, with the greenback's DXY index surging to its highest level since Donald Trump's tariff shock in April last year.
But even this thinking has been affected by the Nvidia and tech sector turbulence. Yesterday, Fed futures had been pricing a small chance of a 50-basis-point rate hike next month but that seems to have been removed again overnight in favor of just a quarter-point move.
Otherwise, the big economic release so far on Thursday was a punchy 0.7% rise in Britain's GDP in the third quarter - its fastest growth rate in two years and bringing growth for the year so far to its fastest outside the pandemic in almost a decade.
Once again, even though the lift was broad-based and would be more than 2.5% on an annualized basis, AI-related business activity was cited as one factor despite this year's Iran-related oil price shock.
CHART OF THE DAY
Britain's economy grew at the fastest rate in two-and-a-half years in the third quarter of 2026, helped by a boost from AI and extending a strong first half even in the face of an oil shock that many had said could trigger recession.
At an annualized pace of more than 2.5%, the UK economy is now expanding at its fastest in almost a decade - when the wild swings around the pandemic are stripped out.
TODAY'S EVENTS TO WATCH
• US weekly jobless claims (8:30 a.m. EST), October existing home sales (10 a.m. EST)
• US 30-year bond auction (1 p.m. EST)
• US corporate earnings including Cisco Systems
• Fed's Michael Barr, Cleveland Fed's Beth Hammack, Chicago Fed's Austan Goolsbee, San Francisco Fed's Mary Daly, Kansas City Fed's Jeffrey Schmid and New York Fed's John Williams speak
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