Jensen Huang resigns as Nvidia CEO; interim successor and China scrutiny unsettle the AI industry

Nvidia loses the CEO who defined the AI boom

Jensen Huang has resigned as CEO of Nvidia after more than 33 years in the job, removing the long-serving leader who turned the company into the most important supplier in artificial intelligence. According to TechCrunch, the resignation came Thursday after reports of two extramarital affairs, one of them with Kimberly Powell, the company's vice president for healthcare; Reuters later reported a third affair involving another employee. Chief financial officer Collette Kress has taken over as interim CEO while Nvidia searches for a permanent replacement.

Doubts about the interim chief

A report in the Wall Street Journal, relayed by TechCrunch, casts doubt on how smooth that handover will be. Huang allegedly described Kress as "a deer in the headlights" during a presentation over the summer, made in a meeting with Nvidia's finance team about plans to extend guarantees worth billions of dollars to data center operators that could not afford to buy chips upfront. He is also said to have described her as someone who could not help him steer strategy or decision-making.

Kress has spent more than 13 years at Nvidia after a previous role at Cisco, and the Journal's reporting suggests she has been an internal check on some of Huang's boldest financing plans. She reportedly questioned the company's program-focused, credit-based deals — arrangements that involved Huang's son-in-law, Nico Caprez — and pressed for clearer methods for judging which deals were beneficial, how to value guarantees and how to determine returns. Earlier in the year she scaled back Nvidia's involvement in OpenAI's Ohio data center project, with the company committing $105 billion in credit after discussions that had centered on $250 billion.

A wider storm beyond the personal scandal

The Verge argues that the resignation is only the opening chapter of a larger story, one involving Nvidia's dealings in China, questions over whether the US government turned a blind eye to protect a powerful ally, and the stability of the AI industry as a whole. The outlet also flags the name "Megaspeed" as something readers will be hearing much more about in the weeks ahead. Newly elected Democrats are expected to press for answers about who knew what and when, and TechCrunch reports that Nvidia is separately investigating a possible Chinese espionage plot.

Israel braces for the outcome

The upheaval has been watched anxiously in Israel, which Huang described in 2023 as Nvidia's "second home." Huang drove the $6.9 billion acquisition of Israeli chipmaker Mellanox in 2019, which became the base for Nvidia's largest R&D operation outside the United States. The company employs around 6,000 people in the country and has planned a multibillion-dollar campus in northern Israel. A 2023 interview in which Kress said she typically began her working day with meetings focused on Israel before moving on to California has recirculated on X, and TechCrunch reports that two Israelis — Apple's Johny Srouji and Nvidia's Michael Kagan — feature among the names floated for the permanent CEO role, though neither is said to top what remains a tentative list.

Rivals see an opening, with caveats

Whoever gets the job will likely hold less sway over Nvidia and the wider tech industry than Huang did, but investors do not expect demand for the company's products to fade as a result. Israeli venture capitalists quoted by TechCrunch see a more nuanced picture. "Slower decisions at Nvidia could give competitors an opening, but if that uncertainty also slows AI spending, they could end up with a bigger share of a smaller opportunity," said Yanai Oron of Vertex Ventures Israel. Adi Levanon of Selah Ventures said Huang's "departure doesn't dismantle Nvidia's technology or ecosystem, but it could give competitors more room to shape what comes next," adding that challengers "now have a window to prove a different approach delivers better economics; a leadership change alone won't win them the business." Venture money has already been flowing toward developers of AI-specific chips and inference software built to compete with Nvidia's stack.

Why it matters

Nvidia sits at the center of the AI economy: its GPUs train and run the industry's models, and under Huang the company used its cash reserves to fund data center projects, stakes in customers and its own next-generation chips. A leadership transition unfolding amid personal scandal, internal friction over billions of dollars in credit guarantees and a possible espionage investigation introduces uncertainty at the very top of the AI supply chain. Who takes the permanent job — and whether an interim CEO who herself questioned the company's dealmaking survives the scrutiny — will shape how AI infrastructure gets financed, whether challengers can dent Nvidia's dominance, and how much political heat the industry absorbs next.