Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigns amid affairs and China spying fallout; Colette Kress interim chief

Jensen Huang has resigned as Nvidia's president, CEO and board member, effective immediately. The company announced the move on Thursday, saying in a regulatory filing that its board accepted the resignation on Wednesday evening, according to TechCrunch. Colette Kress, Nvidia's chief financial officer, steps in as interim CEO while remaining CFO, and the board has begun a search for a permanent successor.

How the scandal unfolded

The resignation caps a week of escalating revelations. According to The Verge, news first broke that Huang had a romantic relationship with Alice Huang (no relation), an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based cloud provider and major Nvidia customer. The New York Times reported that she was allegedly a surveillance operative passing information to China's Ministry of State Security, focused on gathering information about advanced AI chips and on influencing which technologies are made available to China. Huang admitted to being "unfaithful" in a weekend memo to employees and apologized to his family and shareholders, The Verge reports.

For a few days it appeared Huang might keep his job: analysts, venture capitalists and President Donald Trump expected him to survive the scandal, and figures including Elon Musk publicly backed him. But on Wednesday The New York Times, citing five people who worked at Nvidia, reported a second affair — this time with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's VP of healthcare, an executive who reported directly to Huang. The Wall Street Journal soon reported the board would meet that same evening to decide his future, and the resignation followed.

Who is now in charge

Kress has been at Nvidia since September 2013, TechCrunch reports, after three years as a senior finance executive at Cisco and 13 years at Microsoft, four of them as CFO of the Server and Tools division. She holds a finance degree from the University of Arizona and an MBA from Southern Methodist University, and Forbes estimates her net worth at roughly $1.2 billion. As CFO she has been a regular presence on Nvidia's earnings calls, making her a familiar figure to analysts.

The board also appointed Harvey C. Jones, a former Synopsys CEO and managing partner of Square Wave Ventures who has sat on Nvidia's board since 1993, as the company's first-ever board chair. The Verge notes that the announcement included no statement from Huang himself.

A company built around one person

Huang founded Nvidia in 1993 and ran it with famously tight control: TechCrunch reports he had around 60 direct reports and never established a succession plan. Although he is the company's largest personal shareholder, he owns only about 3.5% of its shares and holds no supervoting rights, meaning the board always had the power to remove him.

Names already circulating as permanent CEO candidates, according to The Verge, include Kress, Apple hardware chief Johny Srouji, Nvidia VP Ian Buck, AMD CEO Lisa Su — Huang's cousin — and Arm CEO Rene Haas. Investors will get their first look at post-Huang Nvidia on Tuesday, when the company reports quarterly earnings.

Markets recoil

Nvidia shares fell nearly 12% in early trading on Thursday, TechCrunch reports, and have dropped as much as 19% since Friday, erasing more than $855 billion in market value. The selling spread across the AI infrastructure ecosystem: CoreWeave fell about 9%, Nebius about 16%, and IREN 6.6%.

Why it matters

Nvidia supplies the chips powering the AI boom, and demand for them still outpaces supply. Its financial reach is enormous: TechCrunch counts about $99 billion in investments plus $25 billion in further commitments, including roughly $30 billion into OpenAI, $10 billion into Anthropic, $2 billion each into the neoclouds CoreWeave and Nebius, and up to $105 billion in credit guarantees for an OpenAI data center campus in Ohio. Huang personally lobbied against tight China export rules and cultivated a close relationship with Trump, and Chinese customers still accounted for about $7.9 billion of revenue, roughly 8% of the total, in its most recent reported quarter.

His abrupt exit therefore raises two large questions. One is commercial: investors already nervous about the debt-fueled AI infrastructure buildout now face leadership uncertainty at the industry's central supplier. The other is national security: as The Verge notes, questions are swirling about whether the alleged spy relationship influenced Huang's push to sell advanced chips to China — and potentially even the White House's own AI export control decisions.