Jensen Huang has resigned as president, chief executive officer, and board member of Nvidia Corp., effective immediately, the company announced on November 1215,16,17. The board accepted Huang's letter of resignation following a late Wednesday night meeting and appointed current executive vice president and chief financial officer Colette Kress as interim CEO. Reuters reported a third affair, the second believed to involve a Nvidia employee, according to two people familiar with the matter2,18. Nvidia shares fell over 14 percent to $148.82 as U.S. markets opened. Since Friday, the company's stock had fallen by as much as 19 percent, resulting in a market cap loss of more than $855 billion6. By the close of regular trading on November 12, Nvidia ended down more than 4 percent. Shares of rivals AMD and Broadcom each rose about 5 percent on the day.
The departure caps a week of escalating pressure on the co-founder who had led Nvidia for 33 years19,20. On Sunday, Huang admitted to having an affair with Alice Huang, an executive at cloud company Megaspeed, whom U.S. intelligence officials believe is a spy for China, according to Financial Times1,13. Nvidia has previously said it had no reason to believe that company secrets or U.S. national security had been compromised. Beijing dismissed the espionage allegations as baseless. New York Times on Wednesday reported that Huang had a second extramarital relationship with Kimberly Powell, vice president of health care at Nvidia, who reports to Huang9. Nvidia did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Powell relationship, and Powell could not be reached for comment, according to Ars Technica. Reuters reported the third affair but withheld the employee's name.
Open-source AI and deal uncertainty
TechCrunch reported that Huang's resignation raises questions about whether Nvidia will continue to support the open model community3. Huang had been a vocal advocate for open models, framing the ecosystem as beneficial for safety, innovation, and sovereignty. Nvidia has yet to finalize a deal to acquire open-source platform Hugging Face Inc. for $13 billion. The U.S. Department of Justice began making inquiries about how the acquisition would affect competition in the AI market, Reuters reported in October4. Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue wrote on X: "This whole thing sucks, and I wish none of it had happened. It's a really sad day! But I want to make one thing clear: we'll keep fighting for open-source AI, harder than ever. This is too important to slow down now. Let's go!". Nvidia also agreed to pay $6 billion for a non-exclusive license for open AI coding startup Poolside's technology. Nathan Lambert, an AI researcher, wrote on X that Jensen no longer being CEO "would be very very bad for the open model cause in the US".
U.S. lawmakers had called for Huang's resignation before the board acted. Two House Republicans said Congress was preparing to subpoena Huang over the spy allegations if he did not voluntarily respond to their summons to a closed-door briefing. Huang is expected on Capitol Hill in the coming weeks for a closed-door meeting with lawmakers.
Nvidia's board had hired the law firm Wachtell Lipton to conduct an internal investigation earlier in the week10. The board also hired a former federal prosecutor to lead the probe. Megaspeed, the Singapore-based AI infrastructure company where Alice Huang works, reportedly purchased $4.8 billion in Nvidia chips over the last two years and has been investigated by U.S. and Singapore authorities over suspicions of illegally sharing chips with China8. The Information reported that Alice Huang facilitated $7.5 billion in chip sales to China14. The Justice Department has taken over the federal investigation into Megaspeed, according to New York Times.
Leadership and governance changes
Kress has been with Nvidia since September 2013, with previous stops at Cisco and Microsoft, and will continue in both her CFO and EVP roles while serving as interim CEO. As CFO, Kress criticized U.S. export controls on China, according to a New York Times profile21. The board appointed former Synopsys CEO Harvey C. Jones as the first board chair in the company's history. Jones has been on Nvidia's board since 199322.
Jones said Kress is supported by an experienced leadership team that has been instrumental in executing Nvidia's strategy and advancing its technology roadmap, and that the board has full confidence in Kress and the leadership team23. The board is considering both internal and external candidates for the permanent CEO role. StoneX downgraded Nvidia's stock to hold from buy.
Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and holds a stake of about 3.61 percent24. Nvidia did not give a reason for Huang's resignation in its press release but thanked him for his immeasurable contributions to the company and the industry.
Wall Street reaction and ongoing probes
Securities lawyers were already moving before the resignation: Schall, Brown & Schwartz announced it was investigating whether Nvidia made false or misleading statements or failed to disclose information pertinent to investors11.
Nvidia had no obvious succession plan in place before Huang's departure7. Before the resignation, Huang pulled out of upcoming speaking engagements at the ElevenLabs Summit and the Anthropic CEO Forum12.
ANALYSIS The immediate appointment of Kress and the creation of a separate board chair role suggest the board moved to stabilize governance quickly rather than leave a vacuum at the top of the company that dominates the AI accelerator market. The unfinished Hugging Face acquisition and Poolside licensing deal now proceed under new leadership whose stance on open-source AI has not been articulated. The split reaction among chip stocks — with AMD and Broadcom rising while other semiconductor names fell — points to a market sorting potential share-gainers from companies exposed to broader sector uncertainty.