Jensen Huang resigns as Nvidia CEO amid board probe into affairs; Colette Kress named interim chief

Huang steps down as CEO

Jensen Huang has resigned as CEO of Nvidia, the chipmaker he co-founded in 1993, after the company's board opened an investigation into multiple extramarital affairs, including one with a direct report and one with a woman alleged to be a Chinese spy. According to The Verge, the board has asked CFO Colette Kress to serve as interim CEO while it searches for a permanent successor among internal and external candidates, and Harvey Jones will serve as the company's first-ever chair of the board.

What the internal messages said

In an email to employees published by The Verge, Jones credited Huang's legacy in accelerated computing, the modern GPU and the platform behind artificial intelligence, while stressing the board's responsibility to the company. Kress, CFO for more than 13 years and described in the memo as central to Nvidia's growth and financial strategy, told staff the company had been through what she called an "extraordinarily difficult period" and announced a company meeting for November 18.

The Verge's Decoder podcast also flagged the scale of the transition: Huang reportedly had roughly 60 direct reports, and the company sits at the center of the AI industry's supply chains and finances.

The national security backdrop

The controversy centers on Alice Huang, an executive at Megaspeed, an Nvidia customer that built a data center in Malaysia. As The Verge's Decoder laid out in an interview with Kyle Chan of the Brookings Institution, US intelligence allegedly believes Alice Huang may be an asset of Chinese intelligence services, and Megaspeed may have ties to Chinese companies — possibly acting as a channel for Chinese AI firms to obtain cutting-edge Blackwell chips, raising concerns that export controls were being circumvented.

Chan argued the strategic logic is murky. If Beijing wanted chip designs, Nvidia's engineers would be a better target than a chief executive who spends much of his time giving policy speeches. The more plausible goals, he suggested, are visibility into US policymaking and, above all, influence over it: Huang was unusually close to President Trump, who reportedly could call him directly at any moment. The central fear in Washington is that China could use that channel to push for looser export controls. Chan noted the irony that Nvidia was already lobbying for relaxed restrictions on its own chips for commercial reasons, so Beijing may simply have wanted a sympathetic voice near the president.

The Hugging Face deal

Huang's departure also lands on an open question: Nvidia's planned $12.9 billion acquisition of Hugging Face, announced in September, which TechCrunch notes is the second-largest deal in the company's history after its $20 billion purchase of Groq's assets in December 2025. The US Department of Justice began asking in October how the deal would affect competition in the AI market, according to Reuters reporting cited by TechCrunch, since the purchase would hand Nvidia a major distribution channel for AI models.

TechCrunch reports the acquisition is still scheduled to close in the first half of 2027, and says Hugging Face did not respond to questions about the deal's status or whether it has spoken with Kress. Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue wrote on X that it was a "really sad day" and pledged to keep fighting for open-source AI.

That unease reflects how closely open-source advocacy was tied to Huang personally. In July he published a policy letter, signed by 25 companies including Microsoft, Meta, IBM, Palantir and Hugging Face, urging the US government not to over-restrict open-weight models. In August, Nvidia committed $6 billion to a deal with coding startup Poolside to help build a US open AI ecosystem, and last month it expanded its Nemotron family of open-weight models with a 120-billion-parameter enterprise model and two lightweight Bolt models for PCs.

Why it matters

Nvidia is the compute layer of the AI economy, and it has just lost the founder who led it for more than three decades in the middle of a national security controversy. Three things now hinge on the transition: whether Nvidia can keep its unusually flat, founder-centric organization aligned under an interim leader; how the espionage allegations reshape the export control debates Huang himself influenced through his ties to the White House; and whether the company still pursues the Hugging Face acquisition and its open-source agenda with the same conviction. For a firm this central to AI, a leadership vacuum is never just an internal affair.