Jensen Huang resigns as Nvidia CEO. A week ago, that sentence would have sounded impossible. On Thursday, November 12, 2026, Nvidia announced that its co-founder had stepped down as president, chief executive and board member, effective immediately, ending 33 years leading the company he built from a graphics-chip startup into the most important supplier of the AI era.
Here is the position as it stands. Jensen Huang resigned on November 12, 2026, after 33 years as Nvidia’s chief executive. Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress has taken over as interim CEO, and longtime director Harvey C. Jones has been appointed the company’s first-ever chair of the board. Nvidia’s board has begun a search for a permanent successor and says it will consider internal and external candidates. The company’s third-quarter results are still scheduled for November 17.
This article sets out what happened, what led up to it, who is running Nvidia now, how the market reacted, and what comes next. Where the story involves allegations, I have said who reported them. Nothing here is presented as fact unless a named outlet or Nvidia itself has confirmed it.
What Happened: Jensen Huang Resigns
Nvidia announced the resignation on Thursday morning, November 12, 2026. The company’s statement said Huang had resigned as president, chief executive officer and a member of the board, effective immediately. It was not a planned handover and not a retirement announcement with a long transition. He left all three roles on the same day.
The board moved at the same time to fill the gap. Colette Kress, Nvidia’s executive vice president and chief financial officer, agreed to serve as interim chief executive while the board searches for a permanent successor. Kress will keep her CFO responsibilities alongside the interim role until a permanent appointment is made. The board also appointed Harvey C. Jones as its first-ever chair of the board. Jones is a longtime Nvidia director and a former chief executive and executive chairman of Synopsys, the chip-design software company, with more than 30 years of experience as a technology executive and venture investor.
Notably, the company’s announcement did not itself give a reason for Huang’s departure. The statement thanked him for his contributions, and the board said it would consider both internal and external candidates for the permanent role. The context for the decision comes from reporting in the days before the announcement, which I cover below, and from a board investigation that was already under way.
The timing could hardly have been more sensitive. Nvidia is scheduled to report its third-quarter fiscal 2027 results on Tuesday, November 17, at approximately 1:20 p.m. Pacific Time, followed by an earnings call at 2 p.m. The company confirmed the results will go ahead as scheduled. The day after that, on November 18, Huang had been asked to attend a closed-door briefing with three House committee chairmen in Washington. I will come back to both dates in the closing section.
Huang is 63. He co-founded Nvidia in 1993 with Curtis Priem and Chris Malachowsky, and he was the company’s first and only chief executive. Reuters reported that he owns about 3.6 percent of Nvidia’s stock, making him the company’s fourth-largest investor, and that he will exit the board as well as the executive roles. His departure ends one of the longest continuous runs by a founder-CEO in the technology industry.
Why Did Jensen Huang Resign?
The short answer is that the resignation followed a week of mounting pressure, and the reporting that created it falls into two separate strands. I am keeping this section deliberately brief, because most of what matters here is the institutional response, not the private detail.
The first strand concerns a relationship between Huang and Alice Huang, a former executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based cloud computing company that buys AI chips from Nvidia. The New York Times reported that United States intelligence officials suspect Alice Huang of gathering information for China, and the Financial Times reported on a US intelligence memo said to allege a relationship between her and the Nvidia chief. The allegations about Alice Huang’s reported intelligence links have not been independently verified, a point the Economic Times made explicitly in its reporting. Beijing has rejected the spying allegations, according to Channels Television.
On Sunday, November 8, Huang sent an email to Nvidia employees in which he acknowledged that he had been unfaithful to his wife and apologised to his family and employees. The company published the email. His message did not name the other person involved. On the same day, Nvidia’s board announced an independent investigation into reports that Huang had been targeted by a foreign intelligence operation. I cover that investigation in its own section below.
The second strand came later. On Wednesday, November 11, the New York Times reported that Huang had also had an extramarital relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of healthcare, who reports directly to him. The newspaper cited five people who had worked at Nvidia. Neither Huang, Powell nor Nvidia has confirmed that report, and Reuters noted that it could not independently verify the allegations. Powell is a long-serving Nvidia executive who joined the company in 2008 and leads its worldwide healthcare business. The report also raised a workplace-conduct question: according to the Indian Express, Nvidia’s code of conduct directs employees to avoid situations where personal relationships create a conflict, and the company says it investigates reports of misconduct promptly.
The sequence after that report was fast. The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that the board was preparing to oust Huang, and Reuters, citing a person familiar with the matter, reported that the board met on Wednesday, November 11, to consider his removal. On Thursday morning, the resignation was announced.
One distinction is worth making plainly, because several reports blur it. The relationship connected to the intelligence reporting is the one Huang himself acknowledged in his November 8 email. The Powell allegation is a separate report that has not been confirmed by any of the parties involved. The board has announced no finding on either matter, and this article draws no conclusion about either.
Who Is Colette Kress, the Interim Nvidia CEO?
Colette Kress is not a newcomer brought in from outside. She has been Nvidia’s chief financial officer for more than a decade, and she is the person who has presented Nvidia’s numbers to investors through the whole of the AI boom.
Kress joined Nvidia in September 2013 as executive vice president and chief financial officer, and she has held the post ever since, according to a Reuters factbox on her career. Before Nvidia, she spent eight years in finance roles at Texas Instruments, then worked at Microsoft from 1997 to 2010, where she became chief financial officer of the Server and Tools division in 2006. She moved to Cisco in 2010 as senior vice president and chief financial officer of its Business Technology and Operations Finance organization, and left for Nvidia in 2013. She holds a bachelor of science degree in finance from the University of Arizona and a master of business administration from Southern Methodist University.
That background explains why the board turned to her. An interim chief executive in a crisis like this needs to do three things at once: keep the company running, reassure investors, and prepare for an earnings report that is five days away. Kress has spent thirteen years inside Nvidia’s finances and nearly 25 years in finance roles at major technology companies before that. She is the executive who knows the numbers better than anyone else at the company, and she will be the person facing analysts on the November 17 earnings call.
It is also worth saying what an interim appointment is not. Kress has not been named permanent CEO, and the board has said it will consider both internal and external candidates. Interim leaders in situations like this sometimes become permanent, and sometimes they steady the company while an outside search runs its course. Nothing in Nvidia’s announcement points either way, and it would be a mistake to read the appointment as a decision about the permanent job.
The other appointment matters too. Harvey C. Jones becoming the board’s first-ever chair is a governance change, not just a title. Nvidia has never had a separate board chair before; Huang combined the chief executive role with board leadership. A separate chair, held by an independent director with three decades in the industry, gives the board a distinct voice while the company is between permanent chief executives. That is a sensible structure for the period ahead, whatever the search concludes.
What the Nvidia Investigation Found (and Has Not Found)
The board investigation is the part of this story that is still open, so it deserves a careful summary of what is known and what is not.
On November 8, Nvidia announced that its independent directors would oversee an investigation into reports that Huang had been targeted by a foreign intelligence operation. A committee of independent directors, assisted by outside independent counsel, is running the review. The board later retained Joon H. Kim, a former acting United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, and his firm, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, to conduct the independent investigation, CNBC reported.
The board’s November 8 statement included a sentence that has been quoted widely since: it said it had no reason to believe that either United States national security or Nvidia secrets had been compromised, while adding that the inquiry would examine all available information. The board also expressed confidence in Huang’s leadership at the time and said he had agreed to cooperate with the investigation.
Four days later, Huang had resigned. The investigation itself has not been closed, and the board has announced no findings. That is the honest state of it: an inquiry is under way, overseen by independent directors and outside counsel, and no conclusion has been published.
The congressional side of this runs on a separate track. On November 4, three House committee chairmen wrote to Huang asking him to attend a joint closed-door briefing on November 18: Brian Mast, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee; John Moolenaar, chairman of the House Select Committee on China; and Rick Crawford, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. The letter asked him to address the New York Times reporting and to explain the company’s security protocols against foreign intelligence activity. USA Today reported that Huang also faces a potential congressional subpoena if he does not comply with the request to provide a closed-door briefing.
Whether that briefing still takes place, and in what form, is now an open question, since Huang is no longer Nvidia’s chief executive. The request was made to him personally rather than to the company, but nothing has been announced about it since the resignation. I would expect clarity on that point within days, and it is one of the things to watch alongside the earnings report.
How Nvidia Shares Reacted
The market reaction was immediate and sharp. Nvidia shares fell more than 10 percent in premarket trading on Thursday, Reuters reported, and the fall weighed on the broader market. The Economic Times later put the day’s decline at 13 percent. Channels Television also reported shares down more than 10 percent in premarket trading after the announcement.
That scale of move is unusual even for a volatile stock. Nvidia is one of the most valuable companies in the world, and a double-digit percentage fall in a single session represents an enormous amount of value. The reason is straightforward: investors were not only pricing in the loss of a chief executive, they were pricing in uncertainty. A founder who had led the company for 33 years, an unresolved investigation, a congressional briefing, and an earnings report five days away add up to a set of unknowns that markets dislike.
It is worth putting the reaction in context. Large technology stocks have fallen sharply on bad news before and recovered. Earlier this year I covered Alphabet losing $500 billion in a single day during the AI bubble worries, and that episode showed how quickly sentiment can move in this sector in both directions. The difference here is that the uncertainty is about leadership and governance, not about demand for the product. Nobody in the reporting so far has suggested that demand for Nvidia’s chips has changed, or that the company’s order book is affected.
Huang’s own stake is part of the picture too. At about 3.6 percent of the company, he remains a very large shareholder even after leaving the board. His financial interest in Nvidia’s performance has not changed, whatever his role has become.
I would not advise anyone to read a single day’s share price as a verdict on the company. Markets react to news first and think second. The number that matters next is the November 17 earnings report, and the guidance the company gives alongside it. That is when investors will start to separate the leadership question from the business question.
What Jensen Huang’s Resignation Means for Nvidia and AI
Huang built Nvidia, and the scale of that achievement is hard to overstate. He co-founded the company in 1993, when it made graphics chips for personal computers and gaming. Under his leadership it built the software ecosystem around its chips, then designed the processors that made modern AI training possible. The Wall Street Journal called him the world’s most consequential AI chief executive, and that description is fair. Almost every major AI system in use today runs on hardware his company designed.
That is exactly why his departure matters beyond one company. Nvidia sits at the centre of the AI industry’s supply chain. Its chips power the data centres of Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta, and the training runs behind the leading AI models. A leadership change at Nvidia is therefore a leadership change at the heart of the AI boom, not a routine executive shuffle.
The first question people ask in a case like this is whether the company can continue without its founder. In my view, the honest answer is that Nvidia is in a stronger position than most founder-led companies would be. It has a deep bench of executives, a product roadmap that extends years into the future, and a market position built on both hardware and software. The chips in development now were planned long before this week, and the customers buying them are buying on performance, not on who signs the letters.
The second question is about trust. Nvidia’s customers are the largest technology companies in the world, and they plan their data centre spending years ahead. What they need from Nvidia is stability: reliable supply, a clear roadmap, and a leadership team they can deal with. Kress and Jones provide that in the short term. The permanent appointment will need to provide it for the long term, and the board’s willingness to consider outside candidates suggests it understands that.
The third question is about the AI industry itself. Huang was not only Nvidia’s chief executive; he was the industry’s most visible advocate, the person who explained AI’s promise to governments and investors and who pushed the technology into every sector. His departure leaves a gap in that public role. The work itself will continue. The AI assistants and tools I have covered on this site, from the major chatbot platforms to the specialised models, run on infrastructure that does not depend on one person. AI computing is now so central that Google recently ran an AI reply from a TPU in orbit, and the hardware behind that kind of work is exactly the market Nvidia leads. You can read about that experiment in my piece on Google’s first TPU reply from space. But the industry has lost its most recognisable voice at a moment when AI policy, regulation and public trust are all being decided.
There is also a governance lesson here that goes beyond Nvidia. A company that combines the roles of founder, chief executive and board leadership in one person for 33 years concentrates an extraordinary amount of authority. When that person leaves suddenly, the gap is larger than it would be at a company with a more distributed leadership structure. The appointment of a separate board chair is a step toward a different model, and other founder-led companies will be watching how it works.
None of this changes what Nvidia sells. The chips are the same, the customers are the same, and the demand for AI computing has not moved. What has changed is the leadership, and the test for the company now is whether its strength was in one person or in the organisation he built. The next few months will answer that.
What Happens Next: Nvidia’s CEO Search, Earnings and Investigation
Three dates matter in the short term. The first is Tuesday, November 17, when Nvidia reports third-quarter fiscal 2027 results at approximately 1:20 p.m. Pacific Time, followed by an earnings call at 2 p.m. That call will be the first time the new leadership speaks to investors, and the guidance the company gives will matter more than the numbers themselves. Investors will be listening for any sign that the leadership change has affected the business.
The second date is Wednesday, November 18, when Huang had been asked to attend the closed-door congressional briefing in Washington. It is not yet clear whether that briefing will go ahead as planned, or in what form, now that he has resigned. The request came from three House committee chairmen, and USA Today has reported that a subpoena is possible if he does not comply.
The third is open-ended: the search for a permanent chief executive. The board has said it will consider internal and external candidates, and searches of this kind usually take months rather than weeks. Until then, Kress runs the company day to day and Jones chairs the board. The independent investigation into the foreign intelligence reports is also still under way, with no published timetable and no findings announced.
For readers, the practical point is simple. If you follow Nvidia as an investor, the earnings report on November 17 is the next real data point. If you follow it as a technology story, the permanent CEO appointment is the one that will shape the company’s direction. And if you use AI tools, nothing about the services themselves has changed. The chips in the data centres keep running, and the companies building on them keep building.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Jensen Huang resign?
Nvidia’s announcement did not give a reason for the resignation. The resignation followed a week of reporting about Huang’s personal relationships and a board investigation into reports that he had been targeted by a foreign intelligence operation. On November 8, Huang acknowledged in an email to employees that he had been unfaithful to his wife. On November 11, the New York Times reported an alleged relationship with a Nvidia executive, which has not been confirmed by any of the parties. The Wall Street Journal reported the same day that the board was preparing to remove him.
Who is Nvidia’s new CEO?
Colette Kress, Nvidia’s chief financial officer, is serving as interim CEO. She joined Nvidia in September 2013 and has been its CFO ever since. The board is searching for a permanent successor and says it will consider both internal and external candidates. Harvey C. Jones, a longtime director and former Synopsys chief executive, has been appointed as the board’s first-ever chair.
Did Nvidia say why he resigned?
No. The company’s November 12 announcement said only that Huang had resigned as president, chief executive and board member, effective immediately, and thanked him for his contributions. It did not state a reason. The context comes from news reporting and from the board investigation announced on November 8.
What happens to Nvidia stock now?
Shares fell more than 10 percent in premarket trading on the day of the announcement, and the Economic Times later put the day’s decline at 13 percent. What happens next depends largely on the November 17 earnings report and on the permanent CEO appointment. Nothing in the reporting so far suggests demand for Nvidia’s products has changed.
When does Nvidia report earnings?
Nvidia will report its third-quarter fiscal 2027 results on Tuesday, November 17, 2026, at approximately 1:20 p.m. Pacific Time, followed by an earnings call at 2 p.m. Pacific Time. The company confirmed the schedule will go ahead as planned despite the leadership change.
What I Would Watch Now
If you asked me what to pay attention to in the coming weeks, I would give you three things. First, the November 17 earnings call, where Kress faces investors for the first time as interim chief executive. The tone of that call will tell you more about the company’s confidence than any press release. Second, the permanent CEO search, because the choice between an insider and an outsider will say a great deal about whether the board wants continuity or a fresh start. Third, the investigation, which remains open and could still produce findings that change the picture.
Jensen Huang’s resignation is one of the biggest leadership stories in the technology industry in years. He built a company that changed computing, and he leaves it at the centre of the AI era. Whatever comes next for him, and whatever the investigation concludes, the company he built now has to prove it can stand without him. That is the story to follow.