The most valuable company in the world had a very bad Tuesday. Then it had a slightly better Tuesday night. Nvidia’s week, as Investing.com reconstructed it on November 11, contains every ingredient of the modern AI era at once: a brutal selloff, a geopolitics scandal, a dethroning, and a CEO under pressure.

The numbers first

Nvidia closed Tuesday, November 10 down 5.47% at $168.89 — the worst performer in the Dow that day — after touching an intraday low of $164.27. In the after-hours session it clawed back 2.46% to $173.04, a partial bounce that suggests at least some buyers decided the panic had overshot.

Zoom out and the damage is historic. The stock is down more than 30% from its October 6 high of $243.37, a slide that has erased some $1.8 trillion in market capitalization. And in a changing of the guard that would have been unthinkable a season ago, Microsoft has passed Nvidia to become the world’s most valuable company for the first time since June 2025.

The scandal underneath

Investing traces the latest leg down to an espionage affair: a Chinese university with links to the military, Northwestern Polytechnical, allegedly bought $123,000 worth of Nvidia’s H200 chips through a local supplier, despite the restrictions meant to keep exactly that hardware out of exactly those hands. Nvidia has hired the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to investigate. On the political side, Senator Cramer has called for Jensen Huang’s resignation, while analyst Dan Ives — per Investing — believes Huang stays in the job in the short term. Investing later reported, in headline form, that Nvidia employees mostly back Huang as CEO despite the scandal.

The Verge struck a similar note on November 10 with a headline framing the saga as a paradox: the US is winning the AI race, but Huang may have fumbled it. When a chip sale measured in thousands of dollars can help knock trillions off a valuation, the story is no longer about the chips. It is about how much of Nvidia’s price was confidence in its untouchability.

Macro didn’t help, and earnings are next

The backdrop offered no shelter: October CPI rose 0.4% on the month, and Investing puts the odds of a 25-basis-point Fed hike in December at roughly 91% — hostile weather for high-multiple tech. Which makes the next date on the calendar enormous: Nvidia reports its fiscal third-quarter results on Tuesday, November 17, with consensus expecting earnings of $2.47 per share on $108.8 billion in revenue, according to Investing.

Beat those numbers convincingly and the crash starts to look like a sale. Miss, and the espionage headlines will have company.

The Bit Take

Nvidia lost a crown, $1.8 trillion and its aura of invincibility in about five weeks — over a chip deal smaller than a house deposit. The empire’s fate now rests on an earnings report: November 17 is either the comeback tour or the second act of the fall.

Sources