British pension holders, savers and investors are highly likely to be exposed to the growing crisis at Nvidia after its chief executive resigned following revelations he had extramarital affairs, including one with an alleged Chinese spy.

Jensen Huang’s resignation from the AI chip manufacturer – one of the world’s most valuable companies – sent Nvidia’s stock tumbling, shedding nearly $500 billion in market capitalisation since the close of US trading last week.

The crisis is worrying, not just for bankers or Silicon Valley elites, but for savers, investors, and anyone with a pension, who may be more exposed to fluctuations in Nvidia’s value than they realise – even if they haven’t bought individual shares in the company.

How the crisis could affect you

There is a good chance that holders of a stocks and shares ISA are exposed to Nvidia through investments in the US stock market.

Retail investors, investing in exchange-traded funds – which hold a range of stocks – through platforms such as Trading 212, could also be similarly exposed.

Popular funds include S&P 500 trackers, which track the 500 biggest US companies’ stock market performance. Nvidia was worth around seven per cent of the S&P 500 US stock market index before the stock slide triggered by Huang’s exit. This means that for every £100 invested in the US stock market, roughly £7 was invested in Nvidia. The company was worth around eight per cent of the more tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 index.

Many pensions will be affected too, with workplace pensions highly likely to be invested in tracker funds, such as the FTSE 100. Some 45 per cent of the total holdings of UK defined contribution pension schemes were held in the US stock market, according to April 2025 analysis from investment bank Panmure Liberum. However, since then, some diversification among pension funds has occurred over fears of the market’s growing concentration in a small number of tech stocks and the risk of an AI bubble.

Savers around 30 years from retirement on defined contribution schemes are particularly vulnerable to Nvidia exposure, as they typically have around 70 to 80 per cent of their assets invested in global equities with the US stock market dominating within that. The “Magnificent Seven” stocks (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Tesla, Meta Platforms, Microsoft and Nvidia), of which Nvidia was the biggest, takes up a major chunk of the stock market’s value. The performance of these companies plays a major role in the success of an ISA.

The crisis has also drawn attention to how reliant UK savers’ finances are on US tech stocks in general, which could be headed for decline if a perfect storm of the Nvidia scandal, AI and data centre backlash during the US midterms, and the ongoing fallout of the Iran war threaten to burst the AI bubble.  

Why rock star CEO Huang’s resignation is so huge

Huang, like Apple’s Steve Jobs, SpaceX’s Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg before him, has become something of a celebrity chief executive in recent years.

Nvidia, like several big tech firms, is highly leader-centric in its running, with the CEO’s choices and personal life having an outsized influence on the valuation. As Huang oversaw the company, it grew from an obscure firm making graphics processing units for video game consoles to what was the world’s most valuable company, with its chips central to the AI supply chain. An employee of Nvidia that spoke to the FT described the company as “a cult” devoted to Huang, and said: “Jensen is a god, and that’s how he’s worshipped.”

Huang also built a close personal relationship with the US President and was seemingly able to extract policy concessions. In October 2025, he donated $25 million to fund Donald Trump’s White House ballroom project. Following that, Trump granted Nvidia the ability to sell its second most advanced chips to China in exchange for a profit-sharing agreement with the US government. 

But the revelations of his affair with Alice Huang, a former executive at Singapore-based tech firm Megaspeed, who is alleged by the US government to be a Chinese spy, cast questions on his judgement.

Megaspeed, where Alice Huang worked, was a partner of Nvidia, purchasing bulk quantities of advanced AI chips. The firm, which was initially owned by a Chinese company, is accused of secretly diverting Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips to China, despite export restrictions put in place by the US. The Chinese government has denied that Huang was spying for it.

According to , Trump defended Jensen Huang after the revelations came to light and encouraged him not to resign. However, his position became untenable when the paper revealed allegations of a second affair with Nvidia’s vice president of health care. 

Unfortunately for Nvidia investors, Huang’s centrality to the company means its future is highly uncertain.

What happens if the AI bubble bursts?

While most of the knock-on effects of the Nvidia crisis and the possible bursting of the AI bubble will have a negative effect on people’s finances, a slowdown in AI buildout could also have some upsides. It could delay or prevent the mass automation of jobs that some businesspeople have suggested will occur. The former Google chief executive Eric Schmitt said in October that AI could eliminate 20 per cent of the workforce of large companies. 

A market-driven slowdown in the expansion of AI infrastructure could also give countries more time to negotiate treaties and regulation, which AI leaders like Anthropic’s Dario Amodei have called for in apocalyptic warnings about the dangerous capabilities of the technology. 

However, the short to medium term may not be so rosy. A collapse in the AI boom could become another factor restricting growth, adding to the strain imposed on the global economy by Trump’s tariffs and the Iran war. 

While the UK received positive news that the economy grew by 0.7 per cent this week, that has not translated into rising living standards, with inflation expected to continue. Some economists fear that it could easily be washed away by turmoil in the global economy. 

Simon Pittaway, Principal Economist at the Resolution Foundation, said: “The UK’s strong economic performance has continued into the second half of the year, which is all the more impressive given the ongoing disruption caused by conflict in the Middle East. But with inflation and interest rates both forecast to rise towards 5 per cent, this resilience will be severely tested in the coming months.”

Gaurav Ganguly, head of international economics at Moody’s Analytics in London, told that the world would “struggle to absorb a sharp AI stock slide on top of an oil shock, tariffs and rising interest rates”, adding that there “could be a severe economic shock with global recessionary consequences”.