Nvidia’s shares plummeted Thursday, sending tremors through global markets, as the company’s chief executive, Jensen Huang, stepped down from his role.

Shares in Nvidia dropped as much as 14 percent when markets opened for trading on Thursday, extending a decline that has wiped out more than $1 trillion from the company’s market value this month alone. The stock began to reverse some losses by late morning.

The company’s board named Colette Kress, Nvidia’s chief financial officer, as its interim chief executive.

With the change in Nvidia’s leadership, investors face uncertainty about one of the poster children of the artificial intelligence trade and how its problems could affect the broader economy.

U.S. indexes were weighed down by Nvidia’s troubles. Both the S&P 500 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq index wobbled on Thursday.

Nvidia has emerged as central to the A.I. economy because its chips — or graphic processing units — help train and power models across the industry. It has also emerged as a central bank of sorts for several A.I. companies, because its finances are deeply intertwined with those of everyone from frontier A.I. labs to neoclouds, which rent out computing power.