U.S. futures are rising and Nvidia’s stock has stabilized as investors assess how Jensen Huang’s departure might affect chip supply and the global artificial intelligence industry.
Futures for the S&P 500 climbed 0.2% on Friday, while those for the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.1%. Nasdaq futures were up slightly.
Shares of Nvidia gained more than 2% before the market opened.
The departure of Huang, who co-founded Nvidia and has been a key architect of its role at the center of the AI boom, has raised questions about the company’s future. Its shares fell 15% after his resignation was announced Thursday, though recovered during the day. Huang had been the face of Nvidia and was deemed by some in the industry as bigger than Nvidia itself.
Huang stepped down after his affair with a Chinese tech executive raised U.S. national security concerns. Nvidia’s longtime chief financial officer, Colette Kress, will be its interim CEO.
A lynchpin of the AI boom, Nvidia trades off with Apple as Wall Street’s most valuable company and has invested heavily in other AI firms. Market watchers will be keeping a keen eye out for what Nvidia’s woes might mean for pending public debuts of AI companies, such as Anthropic’s pending IPO, valued at $1.3 trillion.
A global outage for Microsoft web services continued to disrupt email accounts and some other applications worldwide on Friday, but appeared to have scant direct impact on markets.
Microsoft said in an update that the outage was affecting a wide range of Microsoft 365 offerings that interact with its Exchange Online and email services. Services including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot were reported by users to be down.
The company’s stock declined 1.4% in premarket trading.
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