Nvidia Accepts Jensen Huang's Resignation as CEO; CFO Colette Kress Named Interim Leader
Nvidia's board accepted the resignation of co-founder Jensen Huang as chief executive on November 11, 2026. The company confirmed the decision in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a required disclosure to the market regulator, on November 12. Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress will serve as interim CEO while continuing to carry out her CFO duties. The board also appointed Harvey C. Jones as the company's first-ever chair.
The departure followed a series of reports that combined personal conduct allegations with a separate federal investigation touching the company's chip distribution. TechCrunch has compiled a timeline of those developments.
On the personal side, The New York Times reported on November 11, citing five Nvidia workers, that Huang had an extramarital relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice president of health care. Powell reports directly to Huang. Huang has admitted to cheating on his wife of 40 years. The Wall Street Journal reported that Nvidia's board was preparing to oust Huang, and Nvidia's shares fell in after-hours trading.
The investigation concerns Megaspeed, a Singapore-based AI infrastructure company. Megaspeed reportedly purchased $4.8 billion in Nvidia chips over the last two years. The U.S. and Singapore had previously investigated the company over suspicions that it was illegally sharing chips with China. The U.S. Justice Department has now taken over the federal investigation. U.S. officials believe Megaspeed executive Alice Huang is a Chinese spy who has been feeding information to Beijing. She is a Chinese citizen and is not related to Jensen Huang, a point that bears repeating given the shared surname.
Several threads here are separate and should be kept separate. The personal conduct reporting concerns Huang and Nvidia's internal reporting lines. The Megaspeed matter concerns export compliance, meaning adherence to the rules on where advanced technology may be shipped, a Singapore intermediary, and an alleged intelligence operation. Nothing in the reporting ties Huang's resignation to the federal investigation, and the company's SEC filing describes the board's action without attributing it to either matter.
The broader context here is operational. Nvidia's chips sit at the center of the export control regime, the set of U.S. rules that limit which advanced AI accelerators (the specialized chips used to train and run AI models) can be sold abroad, and to whom. Any question about whether volume purchases routed through a third-country integrator, a firm that buys and assembles hardware for resale, reached Chinese end users lands directly on the company's compliance function. A Justice Department inquiry adds a criminal dimension that a civil or administrative review would not. For a company of Nvidia's size, the leadership transition will test how quickly a dual-role interim CEO and CFO can keep attention on product roadmaps, customer commitments and regulatory exposure at the same time.
In my view, the most useful thing to watch over the coming weeks is not the personnel story but whether the compliance questions around Megaspeed produce any formal finding, and how the company describes its own review of those sales. Those answers will matter far more to customers, regulators and the rest of the AI infrastructure supply chain than the identity of the next permanent chief executive.
The company now has a board chair who is a distinct role from its chief executive, and an interim leader who already runs the finance function that will need to account for any enforcement outcome. Whatever the coming months bring, a defined board leadership role and a named interim executive give Nvidia's customers and partners a concrete point of contact while the investigations proceed.
