Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigns effective immediately; CFO Colette Kress named interim CEO

Nvidia's board of directors has announced that Jensen Huang has resigned as president, chief executive officer and board member, effective immediately, ending his 33-year tenure at the helm of the company he co-founded in 1993. Colette Kress, Nvidia's executive vice president and chief financial officer, will serve as interim CEO while keeping her CFO responsibilities until a permanent successor is found.

According to The Verge, the announcement followed a late-Wednesday board meeting that The Wall Street Journal had reported was called to decide Huang's future. Notably, the official statement makes no mention of the events of the past week. Both The Verge and the BBC connect the resignation to reports of two extramarital affairs that had put Huang's position in doubt over recent days.

The scandal that preceded the resignation

The Verge reports that the first affair involved Alice Huang (no relation to the CEO), an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based cloud provider that is itself a major Nvidia customer. Citing The New York Times, The Verge says she was allegedly a surveillance operative passing information to China's Ministry of State Security, focused on gathering details about advanced AI chips in the US and influencing which technology becomes available to China. Huang apologized to employees in a memo over the weekend, admitting he had been unfaithful, without naming anyone involved.

The situation escalated on Wednesday when The New York Times, citing five people who worked at Nvidia, reported a second affair, this time with an executive who reported directly to Huang, identified as VP of healthcare Kimberly Powell. The Verge notes that as recently as Monday, analysts, venture capitalists and President Trump had expected Huang to survive the scandal with his role intact, with figures including Elon Musk publicly backing him.

Who is now in charge

Kress joined Nvidia in September 2013 and, according to the company's announcement, spent nearly 25 years before that in finance roles at technology companies including Cisco and Microsoft. She said Nvidia's strength has always come from its people and committed to building on the foundation Huang created, continuing the company's work in accelerated computing and AI.

The board also appointed Harvey C. Jones as Nvidia's first-ever chair, a structural change the BBC highlights given the company previously had no permanent board chairperson. Jones, a former CEO and executive chairman of Synopsys, said Kress has a deep understanding of the business and that the board expects operations, customer commitments and the product roadmap to continue without interruption.

The Verge points out that the statement includes no comment from Huang himself. Reports have already surfaced, it adds, putting names such as Apple hardware chief Johny Srouji on the candidate list for the permanent role. Nvidia's third-quarter fiscal 2027 results remain scheduled for November 17, followed by the usual earnings call.

Market reaction and analyst views

The BBC reports that Nvidia shares fell nearly 8% over four days, with a further drop of close to 8% in after-hours trading after the news. At those overnight levels, the stock would open around $158, down from just over $188 at Friday's close. The company, valued at about $4.2 trillion, is one of the world's most valuable, and Huang, who the BBC says is 63 with an estimated net worth of $145 billion, owns more than 870 million shares, over 3.5% of the company, according to an SEC filing.

Analysts quoted by the BBC see no obvious successor, with market analyst Anna Wu suggesting the realistic near-term path was interim leadership drawn from Nvidia's long-serving inner circle, possibly a co-CEO structure pairing Kress with a product and technology leader such as Ian Buck. Hargreaves Lansdown's Matt Britzman expects short-term turbulence for the stock but argues that demand for AI remains intact.

Why it matters

Nvidia supplies the bulk of the chips powering today's AI industry, and per The Verge holds an investment portfolio of roughly $99 billion spanning AI labs and cloud providers, giving it outsized influence over the sector's direction. Huang's abrupt exit removes a figure the BBC describes as unusually central to how the company runs: Nvidia has a deliberately flat structure with no second-in-command and dozens of people reporting directly to the CEO. There are also unresolved questions, raised by The Verge, about whether the first affair influenced Huang's reported push to sell advanced chips to China and potentially even US export-control decisions. How the CEO search resolves, and whether the November 17 earnings call calms or rattles markets, will shape confidence across the AI supply chain.