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 per cent on Friday, while those for the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.1 per cent. Nasdaq futures were up slightly. Shares of Nvidia gained more than two per cent 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 per cent 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 US$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 per cent in premarket trading. Wall Street is also waiting on Friday for the U.S. to release its producer price index for October, which captures inflation before it reaches consumers. The September report showed the biggest increase since December 2022 and that data showed that rising fuel prices, particularly for diesel fuel, continue to push shipping and warehousing prices higher. Oil prices are mixed a day after U.S. President Donald Trump said that 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!” Brent crude, the international standard, was up 0.2 per cent at $96.04 a barrel on Friday. It was trading near $72 per barrel in late February before the Iran war began. Benchmark U.S. crude fell 0.4 per cent, to $88.39 a barrel. In Europe, Germany’s DAX climbed 0.1 per cent, to 26,806.21 and the CAC 40 in Paris rose 0.1 per cent, to 8,365.44. Britain’s FTSE 100 gained 0.1 per cent to 10,871.82. Asian markets were mostly lower. The U.S. dollar rose to 159.98 Japanese yen from 159.84 yen. The euro was trading at $1.1051, down from $1.1055. By Chan Ho-him and Michelle Chapman
