Jensen Huang has resigned as president and chief executive of Nvidia and stepped down from its board with immediate effect, with chief financial officer Colette Kress appointed interim CEO. Kress will keep her duties as executive vice president and CFO while leading the company until a permanent successor is named, and the board has opened a search that will consider internal and external candidates. The board has also appointed its first-ever chair.
Nvidia’s statement did not give a reason for the departure. Huang co-founded the chipmaker 33 years ago and built it into a $4 trillion company that powered the artificial intelligence boom. The board met Wednesday night to discuss ousting him after The New York Times reported that Huang had a second affair, this time with an Nvidia executive who reported to him.
The Times reported in late October that Huang had a close relationship with a Chinese woman at a Singapore-based company buying Nvidia chips, whom US intelligence officials concluded had been recruited by China’s top spy agency. The relationship triggered investigations by the FBI, the US Congress and the company itself, and Nvidia also faces a shareholder class-action lawsuit.
“There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry,” Huang wrote on 8 November, admitting he had been unfaithful to his wife and adding that he would cooperate fully with the board’s investigation. The board said at the time that a committee of independent directors, assisted by outside counsel, would oversee the inquiry, and that it had no reason to believe national security or Nvidia secrets had been compromised.
“The Board has confidence in Jensen and his leadership team,” the directors stated in that 8 November announcement. Four days later, Huang was gone. US President Donald Trump, a close ally, said earlier this week that Huang told him he had “absolutely no idea” he was in a relationship with an intelligence operative.
Nvidia’s stock was down 11.9% in premarket trading Thursday morning, after already falling more than 20% over the past month. The company has lost more than $600bn in market value this week alone. Bernstein halved its price target on the stock from $400 to $200.
Richard Reyle, Chief Investment Officer at Questar Capital Partners, said Nvidia’s lack of a succession plan makes the stock “uninvestable.” Jason Schloetzer, an associate professor at Georgetown University who studies CEO succession, told Fortune that Nvidia’s concentration of power and decision-making in Huang leaves it very vulnerable to what comes next.
Nvidia’s obligations to other firms, estimated at $400 billion, have earned it the nickname “the central bank of AI”, and problems at the company could ripple across the financial system through circular financing arrangements. Huang helped bankroll the AI ecosystem by pouring Nvidia’s growing cash pile back into cloud providers, suppliers and the industry’s biggest labs.
That influence stretched well beyond Silicon Valley. Huang personally drove multi-gigawatt deployments with Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Google Cloud and Oracle, as well as sovereign AI buyers in the UK, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, South Korea and Japan. Kress, his interim replacement, has been Nvidia’s public financial voice since 2013.
“For as long as I deserve it,” Huang said at CES in January, when asked how long he would remain chief executive. He had also joked that the secret to a long tenure was not getting fired and not getting bored.
