You would think the biggest AI company in the world getting hit with a spy scandal would drag the whole market down with it. It didn’t. On Monday, 9 November 2026, US stocks rallied hard, and Nvidia was one of the few big names that went the other way.
Quick note before you read on: the stocks did not go up because of the scandal. They went up while it was happening. Nvidia fell, almost everything else in tech rose, and traders mostly treated the Jensen Huang story as an Nvidia problem, not a market problem.
The numbers from Monday’s close
Here’s where the major indexes finished, according to Yahoo Finance:
| Index | Close | Change |
|---|---|---|
| S&P 500 | 7,549.94 | +173.08 (+2.35%) |
| Dow Jones Industrial Average | 52,389.75 | +1,104.02 (+2.15%) |
| Nasdaq Composite | 25,253.14 | +673.71 (+2.74%) |
| Russell 2000 | 2,841.45 | +87.34 (+3.17%) |
Chip stocks led the way. FinancialJuice reported the chipmaker index rose 6.9% and the Nasdaq 100 gained 3.4%.
Nvidia closed at $178.67, down $7.97 or 4.27%. It was down about 8% early in the session before buyers cut the loss roughly in half, Yahoo Finance reported.
What the Nvidia scandal is about
If you missed the weekend news, here’s the short version.
On Sunday, 8 November, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang admitted to an affair. In a memo, he wrote: “I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry.”
The woman involved is Alice Huang (no relation), a businesswoman who, according to The New York Times, US intelligence believes was gathering information for China. Nvidia’s board said it is opening an independent investigation into reports that Huang was the target of a foreign intelligence effort. A committee of independent directors with outside lawyers will run it, and the board said it has no reason to believe company secrets or national security were harmed.
None of the spy claims have been proven in public. China’s Foreign Ministry dismissed them on Monday as a smear campaign against Beijing, the Associated Press reported.
We covered the full background, including the investor pitch Alice Huang allegedly made for Nvidia chips, in our article on the alleged Chinese spy linked to Nvidia.
Why the rest of the market went up anyway
A few things were going on at the same time.
Stocks were bouncing back from a rough week. Last Thursday, 5 November, AI stocks got hammered. The AP tied that sell-off to worries that Democratic wins in the midterm elections could slow the building of AI data centres, especially in Texas. The S&P 500 lost 2.7% over the week, its worst week since the “Liberation Day” tariff shock in April 2025, per the AP. Yahoo Finance said broader indexes “shrugged off” the Nvidia news on Monday as they kept recovering from that sell-off.
Dip buyers showed up. FinancialJuice described “a renewed wave of dip buying” in tech.
Oil fell. Brent crude slipped about 2% to $96.38 a barrel early Monday, the AP reported. FinancialJuice linked the drop to hopes of a settlement in the Iran war after President Trump said it was “highly unlikely” he would launch widespread strikes. Cheaper oil eased inflation worries ahead of Tuesday’s October CPI report.
Investors saw the scandal as Nvidia’s problem. Joachim Klement of Panmure Liberum told CNBC he thought the impact would stay contained to Nvidia, as reported by StockTitan. Not everyone is that relaxed. Stephen Innes of SPI Asset Management wrote that the scrutiny on Huang “reaches far beyond a personal scandal,” touching the overlap of US tech leadership, China and national security, per the AP.
The stocks that jumped the most
Some of Monday’s biggest movers in tech and AI:
- AMD rose about 12% after Oppenheimer upgraded the stock, Yahoo Finance reported. On a day when Nvidia was in trouble, its closest rival in AI chips had a very good one.
- Broadcom was up about 8% in the early afternoon, according to CNBC as cited by StockTitan.
- Cloudflare jumped 11% to $297.22 after third-quarter revenue rose 39.2% to $782.51 million, beating the $738.30 million analysts expected, per 24/7 Wall St. CEO Matthew Prince called it “Cloudflare’s best quarter ever.”
- Nebius rose 9% to $140.70 ahead of its earnings report, expected on 12 November.
- CoreWeave gained 6% to $49.18 after a multi-year cloud deal with self-driving company Wayve, 24/7 Wall St. reported.
- Oracle added 3% to $119.16.
Note that the Broadcom, Cloudflare, Nebius, CoreWeave and Oracle figures were reported during the trading day, not at the close, so the final numbers may be a little different.
What this means for Nvidia shareholders
Nvidia was already having a hard time before any of this. On Friday, 6 November, the stock rose 2.8% after two earlier drops of 9.3% and 3.2%, per the AP. StockTitan estimated Nvidia had lost about $243 billion in market value by early Monday afternoon compared with Friday’s close of $186.64.
So if you own Nvidia, Monday stung twice. Your stock fell while almost everything around it went up.
Dates to watch this month
- 10 November: October CPI inflation report, 8:30 a.m. ET.
- 11 November: Deadline for Jensen Huang to reply to three House committee chairs who want him at a closed-door briefing.
- 17 November: Nvidia reports third-quarter results, with a call at 5 p.m. ET, per StockTitan.
- 18 November: The House briefing on Nvidia’s security protocols.
