Jensen Huang is out at NVIDIA

NVIDIA's board announced Thursday, November 12, that Jensen Huang has resigned as President, Chief Executive Officer, and a member of the Board, effective immediately. The board accepted his resignation on Wednesday, November 11, and the company disclosed the change in a Form 8-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday. Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress has agreed to serve as interim CEO while keeping her finance role, and the board has begun a search for a permanent chief executive that will consider internal and external candidates. The board also appointed longtime director Harvey C. Jones as its first-ever chair. The announcement gave no reason for the departure and carried no comment from Huang; the board thanked him for his "immeasurable contributions to the company and the industry."

The resignation caps five days of escalating pressure. The New York Times first reported in October 2025 on Huang's business connection to Alice Huang, a former executive at Singapore-based cloud company Megaspeed; Reuters later reported that U.S. authorities had concluded she was a Chinese intelligence asset. On November 8, NVIDIA's board said independent directors, assisted by outside counsel Wachtell Lipton, would investigate whether Huang had been the target of a foreign intelligence operation. The same day, Huang acknowledged in a letter to staff that he had been unfaithful to his wife and apologized. On November 11, the Times reported a second affair, with Kimberly Powell, NVIDIA's vice president of healthcare, and The Wall Street Journal reported that the board was preparing to remove him. The board had said on November 8 that it had confidence in Huang and "no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised."

NVIDIA is the company the AI boom runs on: its chips power nearly every frontier model, and Huang, 63, was the industry's central figure — the founder who turned a graphics-chip maker into one of the world's most valuable companies and its loudest evangelist for accelerated computing. He co-founded NVIDIA in 1993 and was its only chief executive for all 33 years. There is no named successor and no public shortlist, and Huang ran the company with about 60 direct reports while saying he did not believe in succession planning. NVIDIA's own proxy statement warns the company is "highly dependent on the services of our longstanding executive team."

The market reacted fast. NVIDIA's shares fell more than 13% after the news broke Thursday, according to USA Today, trading around $158 — their lowest since July 2025, per TechSpot — and CNBC reported the drop pushed the company's market value below $4 trillion, after a peak above $5.5 trillion earlier this year. Huang owns about 3.6% of the stock. For now the company's roadmap sits with an interim chief who is also still the CFO, while the board runs a search with no announced timeline — so the customers who plan their AI buildouts around NVIDIA's chips, from the big clouds to the model labs, are watching what comes next.

The first public test comes Tuesday, November 17, when NVIDIA reports third-quarter fiscal 2027 results at about 1:20 p.m. PT, followed by the earnings call at 2 p.m. PT, as previously scheduled. Kress will host a company meeting on November 18 to discuss the transition. The board's search for a permanent chief executive is underway with no timeline disclosed, and the independent investigation led by Wachtell Lipton continues — its findings have not been published. USA Today also reports Huang faces a potential congressional subpoena if he does not comply with a request for a closed-door briefing about the allegations involving the Chinese businesswoman.

The board says it expects the company's operations, customer commitments, and product roadmap to continue without interruption, and Kress said the company will keep advancing the work that made NVIDIA a leader in accelerated computing and AI. Whether that holds depends on the successor search and the November 17 call — the first time NVIDIA reports results without the founder who built it.