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Jensen Huang Resigns as Nvidia CEO After 33 Years — Colette Kress Takes Over as Interim Chief

By FreshSynapse Editorial · · 4 min read

An older businessman in a suit pointing at stock-market charts on a large screen, holding a blue folder

Photo: Hippopx (public domain). Illustrative image.

What happened. Nvidia announced on Thursday 12 November 2026 that Jensen Huang has resigned as president, chief executive officer and a member of the board, effective immediately. The company said chief financial officer Colette Kress will serve as interim CEO while the board searches for a permanent successor, and named longtime director and former Synopsys chief executive Harvey C. Jones as its first board chair. Huang, 63, co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and had run it ever since. He owns about 3.6% of the company’s stock and will also leave the board. Nvidia gave no reason for the resignation in its statement, beyond thanking Huang for what it called his immeasurable contributions to the company and the industry.

The market’s verdict. Nvidia shares fell as much as 14% on Thursday after the announcement, on top of an 8.6% fall in after-hours trading the night before, when The Wall Street Journal reported that the board was preparing to remove him. The stock had already fallen 4.27% on Monday and 5.47% on Tuesday. The week caps a brutal stretch for the AI trade, which wiped out $2.5 trillion in a single day earlier this month — and Nvidia is the company at the centre of it. Its chips power the data centres behind nearly every frontier model, and its valuation has rested heavily on Huang himself.

How the week unfolded. The resignation is the end of a sequence that moved fast. On Sunday 8 November, the board opened an independent investigation into reports that Huang had been the target of a foreign intelligence effort, overseen by independent directors with outside counsel — while saying it had “no reason to believe” national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised and that it had confidence in Huang and his leadership team. That day Huang told employees he had been unfaithful to his wife and apologised to his family and colleagues. On 10 November the independent directors retained former acting US Attorney Joon H. Kim and his firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to run the inquiry. On 11 November the Journal reported the board was preparing to remove him. On 12 November he resigned.

What the reports allege — and what has not been proved. The reporting links the crisis to two alleged extramarital affairs. The New York Times first reported that a memo shared with Trump administration policymakers last spring identified Alice Huang, an executive at Megaspeed, an Nvidia customer, as having been recruited by China’s Ministry of State Security to gather information on Jensen Huang. The Times later reported a second alleged affair, with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of healthcare. US intelligence officials suspect Alice Huang of spying for China; Beijing denies the allegation and it has not been publicly confirmed. Reuters reported on 12 November, citing two people familiar with the matter, that Huang also had an intimate relationship with another Nvidia employee. None of the underlying allegations has been proved, and Nvidia has not publicly addressed the Powell allegation.

What comes next. The pressure is not over. House Foreign Affairs Chair Brian Mast told reporters on 12 November that Huang has agreed to testify before Congress ahead of Thanksgiving, and a shareholder class-action lawsuit has been filed in federal court in San Jose. Kress told employees the company will hold a meeting on 18 November, and Nvidia reports third-quarter results on 17 November — the first earnings call of the post-Huang era. The board has no public succession plan, and analysts quoted by Reuters noted that an immediate removal would be challenging precisely because no successor was lined up. Now the board must find one anyway, while the industry’s most important supplier is led by an interim chief for the first time in its history.

Sources

  • Nvidia
  • Jensen Huang
  • AI business
  • AI chips
  • stock market

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