In barely five weeks, Nvidia has lost its founder as boss and nearly a third of its stock market value.
Jensen Huang resigned as president, chief executive and director on Thursday, ending a 33-year run after reports of affairs with a suspected Chinese spy and a company executive.
Finance chief Colette Kress is now interim chief executive and will stay on as chief financial officer, just days before the AI chipmaker reports results on Tuesday 17 November.
Wedbush Securities reckons the market has already priced in the worst of it.
The broker cut its price target to $275 from $345 but kept its 'outperform' rating, against a share price of $166.19.
The bad news
Analyst Matt Bryson said three things have "sucked up the oxygen" that drove the shares after ChatGPT arrived.
The first is closer scrutiny of how data centres are being financed, which raises questions about how long AI spending can keep growing.
The second is the Democrats' midterm wins, which have stirred fears that new rules could slow or stop data centre construction in the US.
The third, and the biggest, is Huang's sudden exit.
The good news
Bryson still expects Nvidia to beat its own forecast and guide above Wall Street for the current quarter.
Nvidia guided to third-quarter revenue of $108 billion, give or take 2%, but Wedbush thinks $113 billion to $115 billion is more likely.
It sees fourth-quarter guidance of $124 billion to $130 billion, compared with a consensus of about $125 billion.
Demand from the cloud giants shows no sign of fading.
Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta spent about $202 billion on capital projects in the third quarter, more than double the figure a year earlier.
Together they are on course for roughly $730 billion of spending in 2026, against about $410 billion in 2025, and all four have pointed to more in 2027.
The Intel test
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Wedbush compares Nvidia's position with Intel's after Brian Krzanich quit as chief executive in 2018 over a relationship with an employee.
Under his successor, Bob Swan, Intel averaged about 12 times forward earnings and never fell below 9 times, despite manufacturing troubles and losing ground to AMD.
Nvidia now trades closer to that floor than to the average, even though it has none of Intel's technical problems and is growing far faster.
Still some hurdles
Huang still faces questions from Congress about his dealings with Alice Huang, a former executive at Megaspeed, the Singapore-based data centre company.
Nvidia shares fell 4.34% on Thursday and are down about 30% from their record high on 6 October.
The new $275 target applies a multiple of about 17.5 times to Wedbush's earnings estimate of $15.53 a share for the financial year to January 2028, plus net cash.
That still implies the shares could rise by roughly two thirds.
