NVIDIA's Jensen Huang Resigns; CFO Colette Kress Named Interim CEO

NVIDIA said on Thursday, November 12, 2026 that Jensen Huang has resigned as the company's President, Chief Executive Officer and a member of its Board of Directors, effective immediately. The company's announcement names Colette Kress, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, as Interim Chief Executive Officer. TechCrunch reported that the board accepted Huang's resignation on Wednesday, November 11, a day before the public announcement.

Kress will keep her CFO title while she serves as interim CEO, and she holds both roles until the board names a permanent successor. NVIDIA's Board of Directors has begun a search and says it will consider both internal and external candidates.

Kress joined NVIDIA in September 2013 as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Before that, she spent nearly 25 years in finance roles at Cisco and Microsoft.

The board also appointed Harvey C. Jones as the company's first-ever Chair of the Board, the director who leads board meetings and oversight. Jones previously served as Chief Executive Officer and Executive Chairman of Synopsys, a chip design software company. According to TechCrunch, he has sat on NVIDIA's board since 1993 and is a managing partner of Square Wave Ventures.

The market responded quickly. NVIDIA shares were down more than 11% in premarket trading on Thursday, the session before regular trading opens. TechCrunch reported that the company had lost more than $300 billion in market capitalization, the total value of its outstanding shares, since Friday, as of Thursday.

The next scheduled event is the company's third-quarter fiscal 2027 results. Fiscal 2027 is NVIDIA's own accounting year. The company will report on Tuesday, November 17, at approximately 1:20 p.m. PT, followed by an earnings call at 2 p.m. PT. That call falls five days after the announcement, and Kress will present the results while also serving as interim CEO.

The broader context here is that the interim arrangement places the company's chief financial officer at the center of both the financial reporting cycle and the top executive seat at the same time. Kress has spent more than a decade in NVIDIA's finance organization, and the board has kept her in her existing role rather than separating the two jobs. How that works in practice will become clearer over the coming weeks.

In my view, the questions that matter most for the next few months are less about the share price on a single day and more about the search itself. A board that considers internal and external candidates is leaving the outcome open, and whether it chooses a successor from within the leadership team or one from outside will signal how it sees the company's next phase. The appointment of a first-ever Chair suggests the board is also restructuring its own governance around that transition, with Jones, a former CEO of a chip design software company, now presiding over its deliberations. Investors and customers will watch closely whether strategy and execution hold steady through the handover.

For the industry, the immediate facts are clear. A company at the center of accelerated computing, which uses specialized chips such as GPUs to run heavy parallel workloads, now has an interim CEO, a new board Chair, an open CEO search and a scheduled earnings report five days after the change. What comes next depends on the search, the November 17 results, and how the new leadership structure performs over the quarters that follow.