Jensen Huang Resigns as Nvidia CEO, Colette Kress Takes Interim Role
3 min readJensen Huang resigns as president, chief executive and board member of Nvidia, effective immediately. The company announced the exit on November 12, days after its board opened an inquiry into reports that he had been targeted by a foreign intelligence effort. Chief financial officer Colette Kress now runs the most valuable company of the AI boom as interim CEO.
How the Jensen Huang Resignation Unfolded
AI Incider covered the start of this story on November 9, when Nvidia’s board opened an investigation into reports that Huang had been targeted. The allegations centered on his contact with Alice Huang, an executive at the Singapore-linked chip reseller Megaspeed who, according to the reporting, was suspected by U.S. agencies of gathering information for Beijing. The two are not related. Nvidia has said it found no evidence that corporate or national security secrets were compromised, and China’s government called the claims baseless.
According to a regulatory filing cited by TechCrunch, the board accepted the resignation on Wednesday and disclosed it Thursday. In a message to employees reported by ABC News, Huang admitted he had been unfaithful to his wife and wrote that he would work to earn back the company’s confidence. Huang owns roughly 3.5 percent of Nvidia with no supervoting rights, so the board always held the power to remove him.
What Nvidia Announced
In its official statement, Nvidia said Kress will keep the CFO role while serving as interim chief executive until a permanent successor is named. She joined Nvidia in September 2013 after nearly 25 years in finance at Cisco and Microsoft. The board also named director Harvey C. Jones as its first-ever chair and said it is starting a search that will consider internal and external candidates. Jones said the board has full confidence in Kress and the leadership team.
Investors reacted sharply. Nvidia shares fell nearly 12 percent in early trading Thursday and have dropped as much as 19 percent since Friday, erasing more than $855 billion in market value. AI infrastructure names tied to Nvidia’s ecosystem slid as well, with CoreWeave down about 9 percent and Nebius down about 16 percent.
Why It Matters
Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and ran it for 33 years with no public succession plan. His departure lands five days before third-quarter earnings on November 17, in the middle of a Hugging Face acquisition that has not yet closed, and shortly after Nvidia put $10 billion into Anthropic as that company heads toward its IPO. Open-source advocates are nervous: researcher Nathan Lambert called the exit very bad for the open-model cause in the United States.
The next signals to watch are the earnings call, whether Kress keeps Huang’s product roadmap intact, and how quickly the board names a permanent CEO. For now, the company that defined the AI hardware era is being run by its finance chief.