The key points: Jensen Huang, the co-founder who built Nvidia into the engine room of the artificial intelligence boom, resigned on Thursday as president, chief executive and director, effective immediately. Chief financial officer Colette Kress will run the company on an interim basis while the board searches for a permanent successor. Nvidia gave no reason for the departure in its announcement, and included no comment from Huang.
The resignation ends a week of spiralling scandal. On Sunday, Huang admitted he had been unfaithful to his wife. Days earlier, Nvidia’s board had announced an independent investigation into whether he had been the target of a foreign intelligence operation, after reports of his relationship with a Singapore-based tech executive whom United States intelligence officials suspect of spying for China. The New York Times then reported a second affair, with a senior company executive who reported directly to him. On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that directors were preparing to remove him. By Thursday morning, he was gone.
Nvidia’s shares fell as much as 13% in early trading after the news broke, before recovering some ground to close down 4.3% at $166.19 — the lowest close since March 30, 2026. The stock is now down about 31% from its October peak. It was a brutal comedown for a company that, only weeks ago, sat at the centre of the most valuable trade in stock market history.
A founder with no obvious heir
Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and ran it for 33 years, longer than almost any chief executive of a major American company. Under him, a maker of graphics cards for video games became the world’s second-largest company by market value, its chips the indispensable hardware for training the AI systems built by OpenAI, Google, Meta and Microsoft.
That dominance is now the board’s problem. Nvidia has no clear successor: Huang had no succession plan in place, with dozens of executives reporting directly to him, and almost none of them has a public profile. Kress, who joined the company in 2013 after finance roles at Cisco and Microsoft, is the only senior figure most investors could name — and the board has signalled she is not necessarily the permanent choice. It will consider internal and external candidates, with the search overseen by Harvey C. Jones, a former Synopsys chief executive who was named Nvidia’s first-ever board chairman in the same announcement.
Prediction markets have already started the guessing game, putting Nvidia executive Ian Buck narrowly ahead of Kress. But the honest answer is that nobody knows who can replace a founder who was, for three decades, the company’s strategy, its salesmanship and its public face in one person.
What happens next
The timing could hardly be worse for Nvidia. The company reports third-quarter results on Tuesday, November 17, and Kress will have to face investors with the leadership question unanswered and a congressional subpoena hanging over Huang if he refuses a closed-door briefing on the allegations. President Donald Trump weighed in on Thursday, posting that Apple chief Tim Cook should take the job — a suggestion nobody at Nvidia has treated as serious.
The deeper question is whether the scandal changes anything about the business. Nvidia’s chips still power the AI boom, its order book is still full, and analysts expect it to earn more than $200 billion in calendar-year 2026. A company can survive a founder’s fall from grace. What it cannot survive is a vacuum at the top while rivals — AMD, Google’s custom chips, and a dozen startups — smell blood. Kress has days, not months, to show the market that Nvidia is a company, not a one-man show.
The board’s investigation into the espionage allegations continues. Huang, who owns about 3.6% of Nvidia’s stock, has not commented publicly since his resignation.
Washington’s stance on AI oversight has shifted sharply in recent weeks — the US recently reversed course and let its AI labs share models with UK safety testers.
