Jensen Huang resigns as Nvidia CEO; Trump floats Tim Cook as replacement

Nvidia abruptly loses its CEO

Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia's CEO on the morning of November 13, according to The Verge. The departure follows reports of affairs, one of which allegedly involved a Chinese spy, and it leaves the chipmaker under the interim leadership of its chief financial officer while any permanent succession plan remains unresolved.

Huang co-founded Nvidia and has been its longtime chief executive, making him one of the most consequential figures in the technology industry. The circumstances of his exit — personal scandal combined with a potential national-security dimension — came as a shock, and The Verge reports that other tech leaders have publicly voiced support for him since the news broke.

Trump's pick: Tim Cook

President Donald Trump wasted no time proposing a replacement. According to The Verge, he posted on Truth Social shortly after the resignation was announced that there is "only one man" to succeed Huang: Tim Cook, who stepped down as Apple's CEO on September 1 and moved into an executive chairman role at the company. Trump closed the post with the phrase "A Legend replaces a Legend," while also crediting Huang with having done a fantastic job.

Trump repeated the pitch on an episode of Stephen A. Smith's Straight Shooter podcast published the same day. There, he argued that Apple would never have become what it is today if Steve Jobs were still running the company, and he credited Cook with taking the ideas and designs inherited from Jobs and others and building one of the world's great companies in a fairly short period. On that basis, Trump said, Cook would be a strong candidate to run Nvidia.

Apple and Nvidia did not immediately respond to requests for comment, according to The Verge.

Trump says he spoke with Huang

On the podcast, Trump also said he had spoken with Huang by phone the day before the resignation became public. He described the outgoing CEO as "going through hell" and said what troubled Huang most was the impact on his wife and family.

Trump weighed in on whether Huang should have resigned at all, saying the answer hinges on whether the woman in question was in fact a spy — something he said has not yet been determined. If she was not, he suggested, the situation might have played out differently. He went on to call Huang a "tremendous talent." The Verge also noted Cook's long-standing relationship with the president, including a statue made of glass and 24-karat gold that Cook gifted him last year, along with an earlier Truth Social post in which Trump crudely characterized a call from Cook about his transition plans.

Why it matters

Nvidia sits at the center of the AI hardware market, and its chips power much of the infrastructure that cloud providers and AI labs depend on. Losing a founder-CEO of Huang's stature so abruptly injects leadership uncertainty into a company whose product roadmap and supply decisions shape the entire industry, at a moment when demand for AI compute has never been higher.

The episode also highlights an unusual dynamic: a sitting president openly lobbying for a specific executive to take charge of a major private company, against a backdrop of personal relationships with the executives involved. Whether Cook has any interest in the role, and whom Nvidia's board actually selects as its next leader, is now the biggest open question hanging over the world's most important chipmaker.