More Bad News for NVIDIA. With Board Planning to Boot Jensen Huang, Sam Altman Reveals Master Plan to Stop Buying Their Chips
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Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) had enough to deal with on Wednesday night. The Wall Street Journal reported at 5:27 PM ET that its board is preparing to oust CEO Jensen Huang and could meet as soon as Wednesday, hours after a New York Times report that Huang had a relationship with Nvidia executive Kimberly Powell. Nvidia has not commented. The same day, its biggest customer laid out a long-term plan that runs through Nvidia’s profit margin.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told about 50 presidents of Samsung companies that OpenAI’s edge will come from owning the whole stack. Asked whether heavy spending was squeezing returns, Altman said “that’s the point”: a company with “vertically integrated infrastructure that costs less than any other company’s” can sell AI in huge volume at thin margins and pull ahead of the competition, according to Q&A materials from the October 31 meeting obtained by Korea’s Financial News and published Wednesday. The article says OpenAI’s investments in efficiency, including chips it designs itself, are starting to pay off.
Read plainly, that is a plan to stop paying Nvidia’s prices. Nvidia sells the most expensive layer of AI infrastructure at some of the widest margins in the industry. A customer whose strategy is to run that infrastructure cheaper than anyone else has to replace that layer with its own over the medium to long term.
Nvidia was at $160.03 in after-hours trading at 7:15 PM ET, down 7.9% from Wednesday’s close, 14.3% below the November 6 close and 33.1% below its October 6 record close.
The master plan, piece by piece
OpenAI has been building toward this for a year. In 2025 it signed a letter of intent with Nvidia for 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems, with Nvidia planning to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI as they were deployed. Within weeks it agreed to buy 6 gigawatts of AMD chips and announced a 10-gigawatt deal with Broadcom to build custom accelerators of OpenAI’s own design, with deployment starting in the second half of 2026. Each step moves more of OpenAI’s computing away from a single supplier, and the Broadcom chips move it onto silicon OpenAI controls.
Altman’s remarks to Samsung explain why. Selling AI in high volumes at thin margins only works if the cost of each unit of computing keeps falling, and the fastest way to cut that cost is to stop paying a supplier’s markup. “If we can build vertically integrated infrastructure at a lower cost than anyone else,” as one English translation of his comment circulating on X put it, “we can get ahead of the competition.”
Why it lands harder this week
Altman made two other points in the same meeting that Nvidia holders will not like. He said “there has been double-counting of demand” for AI, and that “only two companies, OpenAI and Anthropic, are actually driving major demand growth.” A boom that rests on two buyers gives those two buyers enormous bargaining power, and one of them has just described a plan to need Nvidia less.
He also gave the bull case: “In the long term, AI demand will grow enormously,” and the biggest limit for the next few years is “the chip supply chain and data center infrastructure.” The world is still short of chips, which keeps Nvidia’s sales high for now. The question for a holder is what Nvidia can charge once its largest customers make their own.
What it means for a holder
A holder who had $100,000 in Nvidia at the November 6 close, about 536 shares, has about $85,743 at the after-hours price, a loss of about $14,257 in three trading sessions and an evening. Almost all of that came from the Huang scandal. Altman’s plan is a slower risk: it goes to Nvidia’s gross margin, the number to watch in every quarterly report from here, and it matters more over five years than who is CEO next month.
For a holder deciding what to do before Thursday’s open, the practical question is concentration. If Nvidia is more than about 10% of a retirement portfolio, both the board’s decision and OpenAI’s plan land on that one position. Trimming inside an IRA costs nothing in taxes. Trimming in a taxable account turns part of the gain into a tax bill, which is worth knowing before selling on a night like this.
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I've been writing about stocks and personal finance for 20+ years. I believe all great companies are tech companies in the long run, and I invest accordingly.
