Key Takeaways
- Nvidia shares fell 4% as Jensen Huang resigned as CEO, after a report that its board was preparing to oust him.
- Intel has a lot riding on Huang. Nvidia’s roughly 4% stake in Intel and the custom chips the two companies are building together were his deal.
- Intel keeps Nvidia’s $5 billion whatever happens, but a new Nvidia CEO could scale back the joint work in favor of Nvidia’s own CPUs.
- The number to watch is Nvidia’s 214.7 million Intel shares, about as many as Intel sold in August to raise $20 billion.
Nvidia (NVDA) fell 4% today as Jensen Huang resigned as CEO, effective immediately. The Wall Street Journal had reported that the board was preparing to oust him, and Nvidia said CFO Colette Kress will serve as interim CEO while the board searches for a permanent one.
Yahoo Finance’s Jared Blikre called it a “boardroom bombshell”, and nearly all of the fallout so far has been about Nvidia. But Intel (INTC) may have more to lose. Nvidia owns about 4% of it, and that stake was Huang’s deal.
Dan Niles, founder of Niles Investment Management, predicted Huang would be out quickly, with Nvidia’s CFO taking over as interim CEO, and he was right. He also expects the new boss to reset expectations: “The new interim CEO will probably want to set a low bar,” he wrote on X.
That’s a problem for Intel. Its turnaround still rests on earnings that analysts expect over the next few years:
Those estimates have already slipped. Before Intel’s third-quarter report in late October, the 2027 figure was $2.11. Now it’s $1.79.
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This was Huang’s deal
Nvidia and Intel announced their partnership in September 2025. Intel would build custom x86 CPUs for Nvidia’s AI platforms, plus x86 PC chips with Nvidia’s RTX graphics built in. Huang said the two companies had talked for nearly a year. On the call, he spelled out what Nvidia was signing up for: “we’re essentially going to be a major customer of Intel server CPUs.”
The stake came with the partnership. Nvidia paid $5 billion for over 214.7 million Intel shares at $23.28 each, in a private placement that closed in December 2025. Intel’s share count has climbed since then as it sold more stock:
Even at 5.31 billion diluted shares in the September quarter, Nvidia’s stake works out to about 4% of Intel.
Intel keeps the cash either way
The $5 billion isn’t going anywhere. Intel’s cash and short-term investments rose in the quarter the placement closed, and August’s stock sale pushed them far higher:
Nvidia’s $5 billion is now less than a tenth of that $54.0 billion. Intel’s server business is also doing fine on its own: Data Center and AI revenue rose 59% to $6.3 billion in the second quarter of 2026. If the cash and the server boom were the whole story, Intel would have little to worry about.
Nvidia sells its own CPUs
A new CEO can’t touch the cash, but they can change the product work. Nvidia’s AI systems ship with its own Arm-based CPUs. In October, its Vera CPU won over AI cloud Modal, which had run its agents only on Intel and AMD chips until then.
Bringing Intel’s x86 chips into Nvidia’s NVLink racks was Huang’s decision. He said the joint products would address “some $25 to $50 billion of annual opportunity.” My read: a new CEO who wants to set a low bar has every reason to back Nvidia’s own CPUs over a rival’s.
214.7 million shares is the number that matters
Then there’s the stake itself. Nvidia paid $23.28 a share. On Nov. 2, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan bought 150,000 shares of his own at about $64.73 each, nearly three times as much. So Nvidia is sitting on a big gain, and a new CEO could easily cash it in.
A sale wouldn’t take a dollar out of Intel’s bank. But 214.7 million shares is about the same as the 210.5 million Intel sold in August to raise $20 billion, and none of the money from this sale would go to Intel. That block would hit the market just as 2027 estimates are falling.
Bottom line: with Huang gone, both the joint chips and a 4% block of Intel’s stock end up with someone who didn’t pick either. Of course, Nvidia’s board hasn’t named a permanent CEO yet, and a new CEO could just as easily keep a stake that has made Nvidia money. The first thing to watch is what Nvidia’s next leader says about the Intel work.
So what is Intel stock actually worth?
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Disclaimer:
Please note that the articles on TIKR are not intended to serve as investment or financial advice from TIKR or our content team, nor are they recommendations to buy or sell any stocks. We create our content based on TIKR Terminal’s investment data and analysts’ estimates. Our analysis might not include recent company news or important updates. TIKR has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading, and happy investing!
