Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Resigns Effective Immediately
Jensen Huang resigned as chief executive of Nvidia, the chipmaker he co-founded, effective immediately. He also gave up his seat on the company's board of directors, the group that oversees the company's leaders. He had run Nvidia for 33 years, according to Town and Country.
Colette Kress, the company's chief financial officer since 2013, will serve as interim CEO. The word "interim" means temporary. She will keep her finance job while she leads, and she will hold the top post until a permanent successor is named. The board also named Harvey Jones, former chief executive of the software firm Synopsys, as its first-ever chair. The chair runs board meetings, and the job is separate from running day to day operations.
The reasons for the change center on a personal matter and a national security question. The Wall Street Journal reported that Huang wrote in a letter to staff on Sunday that he had been unfaithful to his wife, Lori. The couple married in 1985. The Journal's report said the affair involved Alice Huang, an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based company that buys Nvidia chips.
Megaspeed is under a U.S. criminal investigation. Investigators are looking into allegations that the company smuggled Nvidia chips into China. Chips are the small processors that power artificial intelligence systems, and U.S. rules limit how advanced ones can be sent to China. U.S. officials also suspect a woman involved with Huang of working for Chinese intelligence, the country's spy services.
The New York Times reported that Huang had a relationship with a senior Nvidia executive who reported to him. Nvidia's board then hired a law firm led by a former acting U.S. attorney. The firm was asked to find out whether Huang had been the target of a foreign intelligence plot.
President Donald Trump came to Huang's defense. Trump said Huang had not known of the suspicions and called him an "honorable man."
Huang's exit ends one of the longest runs at the top of the technology industry. He helped turn Nvidia from a maker of graphics cards for video games into one of the most valuable companies in the world, with its chips at the center of the AI boom. The company disclosed the change in a current report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the federal agency that oversees public companies. That filing is dated November 12, 2026.
Kress has run the company's finances for more than a decade, so the handoff keeps a familiar hand on the books. The bigger open question is who will lead Nvidia over the long run, and when the board will name that person. For now, the company's future rests with a temporary CEO and a new chair.
