Jensen Huang Has Resigned as Nvidia CEO: Colette Kress Takes Over, the Search Begins, and What It Means for AI

AI-generated illustration of an empty chief executive chair in a dark boardroom, a glowing green graphics chip on the table, and a falling stock chart on the wall behind it

Jensen Huang has resigned as Nvidia's chief executive, ending the 33-year run of the founder who turned a graphics-chip company into the centre of the artificial intelligence economy. Nvidia announced on Thursday 12 November that Huang had resigned as president, chief executive officer, and a member of the board, effective immediately. Chief financial officer Colette Kress will serve as interim chief executive while keeping her finance role, and the board has appointed longtime director Harvey C. Jones as its first-ever chairman. The board is starting a search for a permanent chief executive and will consider internal and external candidates. The announcement came less than a day after The Wall Street Journal reported that the board was preparing to oust Huang — a story we covered in detail earlier today — and it turns a board investigation into a completed leadership change at one of the world's most valuable companies. The shares fell sharply on the news, opening about 10 percent lower in New York trading before settling to a loss of about 6.5 percent, and the Nasdaq 100 dropped 1.4 percent at the open. Two things need to be said plainly at the start. First, Nvidia's announcement gave no reason for the resignation and included no comment from Huang himself; the company thanked him for his "immeasurable contributions to the company and the industry." The reporting that preceded it — two extramarital affairs, one involving a woman United States officials suspect of spying for China, and another with a senior executive who reported to him — is the context the press has established, but the most serious claims in that reporting, including that an affair helped move export-restricted chips worth billions of dollars to China, remain reported but unverified. Second, this is a new development, not a repeat of this morning's post: the question is no longer whether the board will remove Huang, but who runs Nvidia next, and whether the company that powers the AI boom can hold its course without the man who built it.

The speed of the fall is hard to overstate. Four days ago, on Sunday 8 November, the board said publicly that it had confidence in Huang and his leadership team, even as it opened an independent investigation into whether he had been targeted by a foreign intelligence operation. On Wednesday, The New York Times reported a second affair, this time with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice president of healthcare, who reported to Huang. Hours later the Journal reported that the board was preparing to oust him, and the shares fell about 8 percent in after-hours trading. On Thursday, he was gone — not only as chief executive, but as president and as a director, a clean break that leaves him with no formal role at the company he co-founded in 1993. That completeness matters. Under Nvidia's bylaws, a chief executive who steps down can keep a board seat, and some observers had expected Huang to retain one. He did not. The board also moved to fix the governance gap the scandal exposed: Nvidia had operated without a chairman, with the lead independent director filling that role, and it will now have a full chairmanship for the first time. The next tests are already fixed. Nvidia reports its third-quarter fiscal 2027 results on Tuesday 17 November, with an earnings call the same afternoon, and Kress has told employees she will host a company meeting on 18 November, the same day House Republicans had asked Huang to give a closed-door briefing. Whoever leads that earnings call will be answering questions no Nvidia chief executive has faced before: not about chip demand, which remains strong, but about trust, governance, and whether the AI boom's most important company can change leaders without losing its way.

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What Nvidia actually announced

Nvidia's announcement was short, formal, and deliberately free of explanation. The board said Huang had resigned as president, chief executive officer, and a member of the board, effective immediately, and thanked him for his "immeasurable contributions to the company and the industry." It named Colette Kress, the current executive vice president and chief financial officer, as interim chief executive, and said she would continue to serve as chief financial officer while holding the interim role until a permanent successor is named. The board said it is initiating a search for a permanent chief executive and will consider internal and external candidates. It also appointed Harvey C. Jones as its first-ever chair of the board. Jones has been a director since 1993, the year the company was founded, and previously served as chief executive officer and executive chairman of Synopsys; the company described him as an entrepreneur, technology executive, and venture investor for more than 30 years. Kress, in a message to employees seen by The Wall Street Journal, promised more information in the coming days about "our future together" and said she would host a company meeting on 18 November. Jones said Kress had played a key role in Nvidia's growth and understood its business, its customers, its operations, and its financial position. The statement said nothing about the affairs, the investigation, or the export-control questions, and it carried no comment from Huang. That silence is itself part of the story: the company is treating the departure as a settled fact and moving on to the succession, while the questions that forced it remain open and unanswered by the people at the centre of them.

The week that ended a 33-year reign

The resignation is the end of a week that moved with unusual speed, and each step is worth recording because it shows how fast a board's position can change. The story began in late October, when The New York Times first reported that United States intelligence officials were concerned that Alice Huang, a business executive at the Singapore-based data-centre company Megaspeed, was acting on behalf of Chinese intelligence and had a close relationship with Jensen Huang. Megaspeed is a customer of Nvidia, and the Times reported in October that the two had a business connection. On Sunday 8 November, Huang told employees in a message that he had been unfaithful to his wife, without disclosing details, and apologised for violating his family's and his employees' trust. The board responded the same day by opening an independent investigation into whether Huang had been targeted by a foreign intelligence effort, while saying it had no reason to believe that national security or Nvidia's secrets were compromised, and that it had confidence in Huang and his leadership team. On Monday 9 November, President Trump said the FBI was examining whether Huang had been targeted by a foreign intelligence operation, while also saying, when asked on Sunday whether Huang should stay as chief executive, "I think so, oh yeah, sure," and calling him "an honorable guy." On Tuesday 10 November, the board's independent directors retained Joon H. Kim, a former acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen and Katz to conduct the inquiry. The same day, The Information reported that the affair with Alice Huang had helped facilitate shipments of at least 7.5 billion dollars' worth of Nvidia chips to Chinese firms, saying her network of companies across China and Singapore had bought about 240,000 H100, H200 and some A100 chips. Reuters has said it could not independently verify that account, and China's foreign ministry has rejected the espionage allegations as "entirely based on groundless speculation." On Wednesday 11 November, The New York Times reported, citing five people who worked at the company, that Huang had a second extramarital affair, this time with Kimberly Powell, the vice president of healthcare who reported to him. The board met on Wednesday to consider his ouster, according to a person familiar with the matter cited by The Business Times, and on Wednesday night The Wall Street Journal reported that the board was preparing to remove him. On Thursday, he resigned. None of the reporting so far accuses Nvidia of knowingly violating export controls, and the board has said it has no reason to believe corporate secrets were compromised. The Justice Department is now leading multiple investigations involving Alice Huang, according to people familiar with the matter cited by the Journal. But the verified facts are serious enough on their own: a board that expressed confidence on Sunday removed its founder on Thursday, after a second affair was reported and after the shares had already lost about 430 billion dollars of market value in two trading sessions earlier in the week.

The market reaction, in numbers

Investors reacted to the resignation as they had reacted to every escalation this week: by selling. Nvidia's shares opened about 10 percent lower in New York trading on Thursday, according to The Times, and fell more than 13 percent at the open in the earliest trading, according to CoinTelegraph's reading of Yahoo Finance data, before recovering some ground. By the close of Thursday trading the shares were down 6.5 percent to 162.31 dollars, according to Barron's, citing Dow Jones Market Data — on pace for a new 52-week closing low and the lowest close since 8 July 2025, when the shares closed at 160 dollars. The Nasdaq 100 dropped 1.4 percent when markets opened in New York. The fall extends a slide that began when the affair news broke: the shares had already fallen more than 4 percent on Monday 9 November and 5.53 percent on Tuesday, closing at 168.89 dollars and wiping about 430 billion dollars from the company's market value in two sessions, briefly pushing its valuation below 4 trillion dollars for the first time since July 2025. Wednesday's roughly 8 percent after-hours fall, on the ouster report, came on top of that. What investors are pricing in is not a collapse in chip demand, which remains strong, but a set of linked risks that are harder to value: a leadership change at a company with no succession plan, tighter export restrictions, a damaged relationship with the administration in Washington, and a governance discount that may persist until the investigation, the earnings call, and the congressional process produce answers. The next hard data point is fixed: Nvidia reports its third-quarter fiscal 2027 results on Tuesday 17 November at approximately 1:20 p.m. Pacific Time, followed by an earnings call at 2 p.m., as previously scheduled. That call will be the first time the market hears from Nvidia's leadership since the resignation, and guidance on China sales and on the outlook for AI chip demand will matter more than usual — because the question is no longer only how many chips Nvidia can sell, but who is in charge of selling them.

Who could run Nvidia next

Replacing Huang is not a normal chief executive search, because there is no obvious internal heir and no succession plan to fall back on. Inc's Jason Aten put the problem plainly: Huang co-founded the company in 1993 and spent three decades building it, and the board reportedly never considered what to do if he was not the chief executive. The New York Times reported that Nvidia discussed succession planning internally for years, but that Huang rejected it. He runs an unusually flat organisation in which about 60 executives report directly to him, and he has said he does not believe in succession planning, preferring that leaders pass on knowledge continuously rather than naming a successor. The betting markets have already started ranking the field. According to Barron's, prediction-market odds on Polymarket put Nvidia executive Ian Buck as the front-runner at 29 percent, followed by Kress herself at about 28 percent, with Arm chief executive Rene Haas third at 6 percent and Advanced Micro Devices chief executive Lisa Su at 2 percent. Analysts at StoneX identified Buck as one of Nvidia's strongest internal candidates, but cautioned that he has yet to prove himself as a companywide leader. Outside candidates named by StoneX include Google Cloud chief executive Thomas Kurian and Amazon Web Services chief executive Matt Garman. The most eye-catching name in the conversation came from President Trump, who posted on Truth Social on Thursday that "NOW THAT Nvidia CEO JENSEN HUANG, who has done a fantastic job, has resigned, there is only one man to take his place — TIM COOK of Apple. A Legend replaces a Legend!" Cook stepped down as Apple's chief executive on 1 September 2026 after 15 years running the company, and is now executive chairman of Apple's board, with John Ternus having taken over as Apple's chief executive. Yale leadership scholar Jeffrey Sonnenfeld had also suggested Cook as a candidate in a Time opinion piece on Wednesday. There has been no indication that Cook is being considered by Nvidia's board or that he intends to leave Apple, and one asset manager quoted by Barron's called the idea "a mega long" shot. The board's formal position is that it will consider internal and external candidates, and the search will be overseen by the new chairman, Harvey C. Jones. Whoever gets the job inherits a company that is still the dominant supplier of the chips that train and run advanced AI systems — and a board, an investigation, a Congress, and a market that will all be watching the choice.

The governance problem the scandal exposed

Whatever happens next, the episode has exposed how unusually the world's most valuable chip company is governed, and that exposure will outlast this week. Until Thursday, Nvidia had no chairman — only about 1 percent of publicly traded companies in the Russell 3000 share that trait, according to Equilar — and Huang, together with the board's lead director, drew up the agenda for board meetings, determined what information directors received, and presided over them. The board has changed slowly even as the company grew into a roughly 4 trillion dollar business: as of last spring, three of its ten independent directors had held their seats for 25 years or more, and two others had served more than a decade. The proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services ranked Nvidia at the risky end of its corporate-governance scoring last spring, citing the long-tenured directors and the lack of a chairman or a mechanism to refresh the board. Huang owns about 3.6 percent of Nvidia's shares as of late March, according to the company's filings — a large personal stake that makes him the fourth-largest investor, but not majority control. None of this was a problem while the stock was soaring. It is a problem now, because the company is unusually dependent on one person's judgement at the exact moment that judgement is the subject of a board investigation, an FBI examination, and bipartisan congressional pressure. The Journal's governance reporting makes the point bluntly: the board denied Huang's relationship, only for him later to acknowledge it, and announced an investigation while publicly declaring it did not expect to find serious problems. The appointment of Jones as the first-ever chairman is the board's first concrete answer to that criticism, and it is a real change: for the first time in the company's history, someone other than the chief executive will chair the board. But the harder questions remain. The board said on Sunday it had confidence in Huang; four days later he was gone. It will have to explain to investors what changed, and why its confidence lasted four days. And the succession question — who oversees the chief executive, who succeeds him, and how a board with no chairman holds a founder to account — will remain open long after this week's meeting, because the answer will be written by the person the board now has to choose.

What it means for the AI boom

Strip away the scandal and Nvidia is still the dominant supplier of the chips that train and run advanced AI systems, with demand that remains strong. That is why this story matters beyond the personalities, and why the market's reaction is about risk rather than collapse. Most of the major AI labs depend on Nvidia's chips and software to train and run their models, and the company is intertwined with almost every other player in the AI industry. A leadership change at the top of that company therefore matters to the whole sector, not just to Nvidia's shareholders. The China question is the sharpest of the risks. China is both a major market for Nvidia and the focus of the export controls that limit it, and Huang spent years lobbying Washington for looser restrictions, arguing that continued sales would preserve American technological leadership. If the scandal weakens Nvidia's standing in Washington, that lobbying position weakens with it. Reuters reported separately on 11 November that a Chinese university with deep ties to the People's Liberation Army bought Nvidia's H200 chips last month despite being on a United States export blacklist, a finding that shows the controls are leaking and that Congress will be asking harder questions about them. There is also a political dimension that cuts both ways. Huang has been one of Trump's closest allies in Silicon Valley and a regular presence in Washington; on Monday, Trump said the FBI was examining whether Huang was targeted by a foreign intelligence operation, while on Sunday he had said Huang should stay. On Thursday, Trump publicly backed Tim Cook to replace him. The scandal has made that closeness a liability for both men, and the next chief executive will inherit a relationship with Washington that is now defined by investigations and hearings rather than by access. For ordinary readers, the practical point is simpler. Your graphics card, your AI tools, and the data centres behind them will not change overnight. Nvidia's products, its roadmap, and its customer relationships continue under Kress, and the company said it expects its operations to proceed without interruption. What has changed is the certainty around who makes the big decisions — on export strategy, on chip pricing, on the next generation of AI hardware — and that uncertainty will last until the board names a permanent chief executive. Until then, treat every new claim with the same caution the reporting itself demands: what is alleged is not what is proven, and the difference is now measured in who runs the world's most important AI company.

Checklist: what to watch next

• Nvidia's third-quarter fiscal 2027 results on Tuesday 17 November, and who leads the earnings call — guidance on China sales and AI chip demand will matter most.
• The company meeting Kress promised employees for 18 November, and whether the board gives more detail on the succession search.
• The closed-door congressional briefing on 18 November, when three Republican committee chairmen want to hear from Nvidia about the reported contacts with the alleged intelligence operative, and whether the subpoena threat is carried through now that Huang has resigned.
• The board's search for a permanent chief executive: whether it picks an insider such as Ian Buck or Colette Kress, or an outsider, and how long the search takes.
• The board's independent investigation, led by Joon Kim: whether it expands beyond the question of whether Huang was targeted, and what it concludes.
• Any verification, or refutation, of The Information's 7.5 billion dollar shipments figure — Reuters has said it could not independently verify it, and the number remains the hinge of the export-control question.
• The Justice Department investigations involving Alice Huang, and whether they produce charges or findings that bear on Nvidia.
• The San Jose shareholder lawsuit, filed 9 November, and whether it survives early motions.
• Whether Congress moves on the AI Overwatch Act or new export restrictions, and whether the administration tightens the rules for H200 or other advanced chips.
• The share price: whether Thursday's 6.5 percent fall marks the bottom, or whether the leadership uncertainty keeps the stock under pressure into earnings.

Bottom line

On Sunday, Nvidia's board said it had confidence in Jensen Huang. On Wednesday, it met to consider removing him. On Thursday, he resigned as president, chief executive, and board member, effective immediately, ending a 33-year run that built one of the most successful companies in history. Colette Kress, the chief financial officer, is interim chief executive, Harvey C. Jones is the board's first-ever chairman, and the search for a permanent successor has begun. The facts that would settle the most serious allegation — that an affair facilitated export-restricted chip shipments worth 7.5 billion dollars — remain reported but unverified, and Nvidia has not been accused of knowingly breaking export controls. But the verified facts are serious enough on their own: a 430 billion dollar market loss in two sessions, a further 6.5 percent fall on the day of the resignation, a senator from the president's own party calling for the chief executive to resign, the FBI examining the affair, and a board that said on Sunday it had confidence in Huang removing him four days later. The next dates are fixed — earnings on 17 November, a company meeting and a congressional briefing on 18 November — and they will tell the market whether this is a crisis Nvidia can close or a story that keeps growing. Huang's accomplishments are still real; they do not disappear because he resigned. But as Inc's Jason Aten wrote on Thursday, no matter how important you are to a company, you are not more important than the company itself — and the size and scale of Nvidia just make that more true, not less.

Reference sources

• The Wall Street Journal, "Jensen Huang Has Been Ousted as Nvidia CEO", 12 November 2026
• Barron's, "Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Resigns—and the Stock Is Falling", 12 November 2026
• Barron's, "Jensen Huang Is Out at Nvidia. Who Could Replace Him?", 12 November 2026
• Inc., "Nvidia's Jensen Huang, the Most Important CEO in Tech, Just Resigned", 12 November 2026
• Reuters, "Trump says ex Apple CEO Cook is 'a legend', should replace Huang at Nvidia", 12 November 2026
• TechCrunch, "Trump floats Apple chairman Tim Cook as Jensen Huang's successor", 12 November 2026
• The Times, "US markets take hit after Nvidia boss Jensen Huang resigns — follow live", 12 November 2026
• Abloominst 24/7, "Nvidia's Board Is Preparing to Oust Jensen Huang: The Second Affair, the Subpoena Threat, and What Happens Next", 12 November 2026