Nvidia shares fell 5.7%, or $10.40, to $176.24 on Monday, reducing the chipmaker’s market valuation by $247 billion after the company announced an independent investigation involving co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang. The investigation followed reports that Huang had an affair with a woman U.S. intelligence officials believe was a Chinese source. Earlier reporting identified the woman as Alice Huang, an executive at Megaspeed International whom U.S. intelligence suspected of acting for the Chinese government; China’s foreign ministry denied the allegation. Nvidia said its board had no reason to believe national security or company secrets were compromised, and Huang apologized to his family, employees, board, partners and shareholders while pledging to cooperate. The episode has intensified scrutiny of Huang’s position and succession planning. Bernstein analysts say no obvious replacement is currently positioned inside Nvidia and rate the stock Outperform with a $400 price target; the shares had closed Friday at $186.64. Leadership uncertainty also matters to Nvidia-backed neocloud providers CoreWeave and Nebius, where Huang has been a prominent champion and Nvidia supplies data-center GPUs. Nvidia invested $2 billion in CoreWeave in January at $87.20 per share and agreed in March to invest $2 billion in Nebius for an approximately 8.3% stake. Analysts are watching whether a leadership change would affect that support, while both companies prepare to report results amid sharp share declines and questions over financing further data-center expansion.