Jensen Huang has resigned as CEO of Nvidia with immediate effect, ending a 33-year run at the head of the company he co-founded and built into the world’s dominant supplier of AI chips.
Nvidia’s board announced on Thursday that Huang had stepped down as president, CEO and director. CFO Colette Kress, who joined Nvidia in 2013 after nearly 25 years in finance roles at companies including Cisco and Microsoft, will serve as interim CEO while keeping her finance job. The board will consider internal and external candidates for a permanent successor.
Kress is the first person other than Huang to run Nvidia since it was founded in 1993.
The board also named Harvey Jones, a former CEO and executive chairman of chip-design software company Synopsys, as its first chair. Jones has been an Nvidia director since 1993, according to the company’s proxy statements.
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Nvidia’s statement gives no reason for Huang’s departure. It makes no mention of the board’s investigation into his relationship with Alice Huang, a businesswoman alleged to be a Chinese spy, and thanks him for his “immeasurable contributions to the company and the industry”.
The resignation came a day after Reuters reported that the board was meeting to decide whether to oust him. The New York Times had reported hours earlier that Huang also had an affair with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of healthcare, who reported to him. Huang acknowledged being unfaithful to his wife in a memo to staff on 8 November.
A week of losses
The scandal escalated fast. US President Donald Trump said the FBI was looking into the affair, and Nvidia lost about US$430-billion in market value in two trading sessions. Its shares fell about 10% in premarket trading in New York on Thursday, Bloomberg reported.
“The board has full confidence in Colette and the leadership team, and we expect the company’s operations, customer commitments and product road map to continue without interruption,” Jones said.
Kress said she was “committed to building on the extraordinary foundation Jensen created over the last 33 years”.
Her first test comes on 17 November, when Nvidia reports its third-quarter FY2027 results as scheduled. – (c) 2026 NewsCentral Media
