Nvidia announced on Thursday that Jensen Huang has resigned as president, chief executive and a member of the board, effective immediately, ending a 33-year run at the top of the company he co-founded in 1993. Chief financial officer Colette Kress will serve as interim chief executive while the board searches for a permanent successor, and longtime director Harvey C. Jones becomes the board’s first-ever chair. Nvidia gave no reason for the departure.
What Nvidia announced
The announcement says the board accepted Huang’s resignation on Wednesday and that Kress will keep her finance role while she leads the company. Kress has been Nvidia’s chief financial officer since September 2013, after nearly 25 years in finance roles at Cisco and Microsoft, and the board said it has full confidence in her and the leadership team.
Jones, a managing partner at Square Wave Ventures and a former chief executive of Synopsys, has sat on Nvidia’s board since 1993. In the announcement he said the board expects operations, customer commitments and the product roadmap to continue without interruption, and Kress said she is committed to building on the foundation Huang created over 33 years.
The week that led here
The resignation caps a week of mounting pressure. On Sunday, Huang told employees he had been unfaithful to his wife, after reports of a relationship with Alice Huang, a former executive at Singapore-based data centre firm Megaspeed whom United States officials suspect of being a Chinese intelligence asset. Beijing has denied that she is a spy.
On Wednesday, reports emerged of a second relationship, this time with a senior Nvidia executive who reported to Huang, and the board met that evening to consider his future. That day, reports said the board was weighing his removal and had hired an outside search firm. The company has not said whether the reports were connected to the resignation.
The legal pressure was also building. A shareholder class action was filed on Monday, and the president said the FBI is probing the relationship, while a House committee has scheduled a briefing on the matter for 18 November. Those developments followed the board’s decision to open an independent investigation into whether Huang had been targeted by a foreign intelligence operation.
The market reaction
Investors reacted at once. Nvidia’s shares fell nearly 12% in early trading on Thursday, and the stock has dropped as much as 19% since Friday, wiping out more than $855 billion of market value. The fall dragged on the wider market, and shares in companies tied to Nvidia’s AI spending, including CoreWeave and Nebius, fell sharply too.
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The speed of the fall is the story. On Sunday Huang was still Nvidia’s leader, apologising to employees; by Wednesday night the board was meeting to decide his future, and by Thursday he was gone. For a company built on one founder’s judgement, that is not a routine handover. It is a rupture, and the market priced it as one.
The succession question matters more than the scandal. Huang ran an organisation with around 60 direct reports and no heir apparent, so the next chief executive inherits a $4 trillion company and a web of investments, credit guarantees and lab stakes that Huang assembled. Kress knows the finances; whether she or an outsider can hold it together is the question.
Why It Matters
Nvidia is not just another large company: its chips are the raw material of the AI boom, and Huang was its face, its dealmaker and its lobbyist in Washington. His departure throws the company’s $99 billion of investments, its credit guarantees and its stakes in the AI labs into uncertainty, as investors question whether the AI buildout will pay off.
The timing sharpens the test. Nvidia reports third-quarter results on Tuesday 17 November, and Kress will face analysts for the first time as interim chief, with the board’s permanent search only just beginning. How the company handles that call, and who it picks next, will shape confidence in the AI trade for months.
Background
Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and led it through the rise of the graphics processor, the CUDA platform and the data-centre boom that made it the world’s most valuable company. He owned about 3.6% of its shares but held no supervoting rights, which meant the board could remove him at any time.
The board had already been moving. Earlier this month it opened an independent investigation, run by independent directors with outside counsel, into whether Huang had been targeted by a foreign intelligence operation, and it expressed confidence in him at the time. The resignation ends that process, and the investigation’s findings may never be published.
Source: NVIDIA’s announcement and Reuters’ report.
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