Jensen Huang quits NVIDIA, CFO Colette Kress steps in

Jensen Huang resigned from NVIDIA effective immediately on November 12, giving up the president and CEO titles along with his board seat, NVIDIA’s board said; CFO Colette Kress takes over as interim CEO and stays CFO until a permanent successor is named. If your team builds on NVIDIA hardware or software, continuity rests for now on the board’s own word that operations, customer commitments and the product roadmap will continue “without interruption”, while the search for a permanent CEO, open to internal and external candidates, is just starting.

Who runs NVIDIA now

The board also created a post the company never had: Harvey C. Jones is its first-ever chair. Jones has spent more than 30 years as an entrepreneur, technology executive and venture investor, including as CEO and executive chairman of Synopsys. He said the board has full confidence in Kress, who is “supported by an experienced leadership team that has been instrumental in executing NVIDIA’s strategy and advancing its technology roadmap.” That team now has to carry a company Huang ran with no clear second-in-command, personally deciding which projects were a priority and emailing engineers about details, CNBC reported.

Kress joined NVIDIA as CFO in September 2013 after nearly 25 years in finance roles at Cisco, Microsoft and Texas Instruments. On earnings calls she has been the other big voice, reporting results and taking questions alongside Huang. “Jensen didn’t do anything without her,” analyst Dan Ives said. Ives also expects Kress to serve as interim CEO for about a year, and the permanent replacement to come from outside the company.

Kress, for her part, said she is “committed to building on the extraordinary foundation Jensen created over the last 33 years.”

How it got here

Huang’s resignation came over an extramarital affair with an alleged Chinese spy and the board investigation that followed, USA TODAY reports.

The story became public on November 8, when Huang apologized for being unfaithful to his wife after reports that he had had an affair with Alice Huang, a Chinese businesswoman whom U.S. intelligence suspects was a spy, per CNBC. Pressure grew late on November 11, when The New York Times reported a second affair, this one with an employee named Kimberly Powell. The Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter, then reported that the board was preparing to remove Huang. Earlier, NVIDIA had said it had no reason to believe company secrets or national security had been compromised, International Business Times reported.

The market reaction was immediate. NVIDIA shares fell 14% on Thursday after the announcement, and the stock is headed for a sixth straight weekly drop, its longest slump since 2012, CNBC reported. The outlet attributes that slide to wider worries about the AI buildout, particularly after the midterm elections.

Kress now goes into the next quarterly report holding both the CEO and CFO titles. NVIDIA will publish its third-quarter fiscal 2027 results on November 17 at about 1:20 p.m. PT, as previously scheduled, with the earnings call at 2 p.m. PT.