Asian shares mixed after Jensen Huang resigns as Nvidia chief

Nvidia’s longtime finance chief Colette Kress steps in as interim CEO

Asian shares mixed after Jensen Huang resigns as Nvidia chief

Asian shares were mixed Friday as investors assessed what Jensen Huang’s resignation as Nvidia CEO means for the global artificial intelligence industry.

U.S. futures edged higher despite earlier losses on Wall Street, which saw Nvidia falling more than 4% after Huang’s exit from the company.

Huang co-founded Nvidia and had been a key architect of the company’s AI strategy and the broader global AI boom. The announcement of his resignation came Thursday after his affair raised U.S. national security concerns, with Nvidia’s longtime chief financial officer Colette Kress stepping in as interim CEO. With Huang’s departure, new questions are being raised about how it could impact the development of the technology. Huang had acted as the face of Nvidia and was deemed by some in the industry as bigger than the company itself.

Many AI hardware stocks across Asia have been highly dependent on the speed of AI infrastructure development in the United States.

In Japan, the Nikkei 225 rose 0.8% to 61,283.16. Shares of chip equipment maker Tokyo Electron were up 1.5%, while memory maker Kioxia Holdings dropped 2.5% and OpenAI investor SoftBank Group lost 5.2%.

South Korea’s benchmark Kospi index declined 0.5% to 5,317.05. Samsung Electronics, one of South Korea’s most valuable companies, was down 0.7%. Memory chipmaker SK Hynix fell 2%.

Taiwan’s Taiex was up 1.7%, with leading chipmaker TSMC, or Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., adding 0.9%. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index was down 0.9% to 23,786.48, and the Shanghai Composite index edged up 0.2% to 3,663.71. Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 slid 0.7% to 9,084.80, and India’s Sensex fell 0.2%.

On Thursday, Wall Street’s benchmark S&P 500 slipped 0.4%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 0.4%, and the technology-heavy Nasdaq composite also declined 0.4%. Shares of some of Nvidia’s rivals rose: AMD, or Advanced Micro Devices, rose 5.9%.

Stocks were also under broad pressure from an increase in oil prices after U.S. President Donald Trump said Thursday the U.S. didn’t “need a deal with Iran” even as the conflict in the Middle East drags on.

“We don’t need a deal with Iran,” he posted on social media. “Those days have long since passed. We’ve got their money, Hundreds of Billions of Dollars, and we’ve got their Strait!”

Early Friday oil prices stabilized. Brent crude, the international standard, edged down 0.1% to $95.70 a barrel. Brent was roughly at $72 per barrel in late February before the Iran war began. Benchmark U.S. crude was down 0.4% to $88.41 a barrel.

Currency markets moved little. The U.S. dollar rose to 159.91 Japanese yen from 159.84 yen, and the euro was trading at $1.1059, up from $1.1055.