Wall Street Is Walking Away From Nvidia — Three Downgrades in Two Days as Shares Slide

Nvidia’s board may not have decided Jensen Huang’s future yet, but Wall Street is already voting with its price targets.

Shares of the chipmaker fell 5.9% in premarket trading on Thursday, according to Investing.com, after reports late Wednesday that Nvidia’s board is preparing to remove its founder and chief executive and has hired an outside firm to identify possible successors. The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg both carried the reports. Overnight, the stock touched $156.20 — its lowest level since July 2025 — before steadying near $164 in early premarket trade, close to its 52-week low of $164.27.

The fall is not about chips. It is about who runs the company that makes them.

Three brokerages step back in two days

Bernstein became the third major brokerage in two days to step back from the stock. Analyst Stacy Rasgon downgraded Nvidia to market perform from outperform and cut his price target in half, to $200 from $400. He kept his earnings forecasts unchanged — AI demand, he said, remains very strong — and instead halved the valuation multiple he is willing to pay, to about 12.7 times fiscal 2028 earnings. In his words, the viability of Huang staying in charge is now the single biggest risk to the stock.

Baird had moved first on Wednesday, cutting Nvidia to neutral from outperform and slashing its target to $200 from $500, citing uncertainty over Huang’s tenure, pending US government investigations and limited visibility on data-center spending in 2027. Oppenheimer followed on Thursday, downgrading the stock to perform from outperform and removing its price target entirely. Stifel kept its buy rating but cut its target to $205 from $315. Morgan Stanley removed Nvidia from its list of top picks, though it kept an overweight rating and a $300 target. William Blair also downgraded the stock to market perform on Thursday, warning that Huang’s possible departure could become a significant headwind.

Not everyone is leaving. Raymond James kept its strong buy rating, and the average price target among 61 analysts tracked by TIKR still stood at $326 as of November 10, before the latest round of cuts. But the direction of travel is unmistakable: in two days, the street’s most confident Nvidia bulls have started pricing in a company without its founder.

A $2 trillion question, five days before earnings

Measured from its record close of $239.24 on October 6, Nvidia has shed roughly $2 trillion in market value in a little over a month, with about $1.58 trillion of that wiped out in the last 26 sessions alone. Its market value now sits near $4.18 trillion, and its forward price-to-earnings ratio of about 11.7 times is the lowest since October 2011, according to FactSet data cited by NDTV Profit.

The selloff is strikingly specific. Rival chipmakers AMD and Broadcom actually gained in after-hours trading, a sign that investors are discounting Nvidia’s governance crisis rather than rethinking demand for AI hardware. Nasdaq futures were down 0.7% and S&P 500 futures 0.3% on Thursday morning, but Nvidia was falling far faster than the market around it.

The next markers are now fixed on the calendar. The board has not announced a decision on Huang, and Nvidia reports third-quarter results on Tuesday, November 17 — when management will face questions about both AI demand and leadership in the same call. Until one of those two questions is answered, the stock is likely to stay under pressure.

For the full background on the board’s deliberations and the scandal behind them, see our earlier report: Nvidia’s Board Is Reportedly Preparing to Oust Jensen Huang — and the Market Is Already Voting.

The Bit Take: Nvidia’s chips still run the AI boom — nothing about demand changed this week. What changed is the market’s faith that the man who built the company will still be running it next month. At 11.7 times forward earnings, the stock has never been cheaper in 15 years; it has also never been this uncertain. Earnings day will tell us which of those two facts matters more.

Sources: Investing.com, “¿Por qué caen hoy las acciones de NVIDIA?” (2026-11-12); Finbold, “Here’s how many analyst cut Nvidia stock price target this week” (2026-11-12); NDTV Profit, “Nvidia Stock At 15-Year-Low P/E: Buy The Dip Or Wait Out The Jensen Huang Scandal?” (2026-11-12).