Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang has resigned, the company announced Thursday, an ouster that follows his admission of having an extramarital affair with a woman U.S. intelligence officials deemed to be a Chinese spy. The decision by the chipmaking giant deals a swift end to Huang’s 33-year reign as CEO and upends America’s race in artificial intelligence.
In his place, the board has tapped Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress as interim CEO. A steadfast presence, Kress will be a familiar face and voice to Wall Street as Nvidia navigates an abrupt CEO transition. Nvidia’s board has started a search for a permanent successor to Huang, and will consider internal and external candidates.
The board has also appointed its first chair, Harvey Jones. Jones, a managing partner with Square Wave Ventures, joined the board in 1993 when the company was founded. As a veteran who has overseen Nvidia since its earliest days, Jones will serve as a conduit for the institutional memory that departs with Huang.
In addition to Huang’s entanglement with a suspected Chinese intelligence asset, the New York Times on Wednesday reported that Huang, 63, had an extramarital relationship with Kimberly Powell, the company’s vice president of health care. Powell could not immediately be reached for comment.
“Colette has helped lead NVIDIA through a period of extraordinary growth and has a deep understanding of our business, customers, operations and financial position,” Jones said Thursday in a written statement. “She is supported by an experienced leadership team that has been instrumental in executing NVIDIA’s strategy and advancing its technology roadmap.”
In a statement, Kress said, “NVIDIA’s strength has always come from its people, and together with our leadership team, I am committed to building on the extraordinary foundation Jensen created over the last 33 years.”
Shares of Nvidia initially fell more than 6% on Thursday. Huang holds a 3.6% stake in the company, valued at about $150 billion.
On Sunday, Huang acknowledged being unfaithful to his wife, and Nvidia announced an investigation into the reports that he had been targeted by a foreign intelligence effort. At the time, the board said it had “no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised,” but that its inquiry would examine “all available information.”
Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and has been integral to the company’s success, particularly its magnificent run in recent years. Growth accelerated in the first half of its fiscal 2027, with revenue of $96 billion, up 85% year over year. Kress previously said the company expected 70% revenue growth in fiscal 2028.
Huang has reigned supreme over the company. Since its founding, he has created a unique, flat structure in which he has sat at the center of most decisions, with about 60 direct reports. Before Jones’ appointment, Nvidia’s board operated without a chair, and the company has not set out a clear succession plan. It also does not have a chief operating officer. Huang has been known to text and call small clients himself.
Nvidia’s succession challenge will not be whether its engineers can keep building chips without Huang, analysts say. It is whether anyone, or any leadership team, can inherit his authority to decide what gets built, secure the industry’s commitment to it, and keep customers confident in the next bet.
Bret Greenstein, chief AI officer at tech consulting firm West Monroe, said that Huang’s resignation represents an Nvidia reset that presents an opportunity to the broader market. Nvidia’s momentum will be disrupted, Greenstein wrote in a note.
“At the same time, Anthropic recently demonstrated that it could move its inference workloads from Nvidia’s CUDA software stack to AMD in just three days, suggesting that Nvidia’s software moat may no longer be as strong as it once was,” he wrote. “This could turn what has effectively been a monopoly into a horse race again, as competitors rush to meet growing demand.”
With Huang’s ouster, the biggest questions are who will succeed him in the long run and what plan the company will put in place to fill the power vacuum.
“Rarely has a board faced this much pressure. This is the board’s moment to shine or fade,” Michael Useem, a professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, told Fortune. “If the board had been doing its job, it would already have a slate of possible successors.”
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, senior associate dean for leadership studies and Lester Crown Professor in Management Practice at Yale University’s School of Management, told Fortune that the Huang saga can be compared to what happened at McDonald’s with former CEO Steve Easterbrook, who was ousted in November 2019. The McDonald’s board investigated Easterbrook for a consensual relationship with an employee that involved the exchange of videos and romantic text messages, and then found that other undisclosed, improper relationships had occurred.
Easterbrook was later charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission with making false and misleading statements to investors about the circumstances that led to his termination. Easterbrook didn’t admit or deny the findings, but agreed to be barred from serving as an officer or director of any public company for a period of five years, and he paid a $400,000 civil penalty.
Huang’s ouster creates a massive hole for the AI industry. Huang has been central to the industry’s rapid growth. His success in creating world-leading graphics processing units, the chips that power AI by handling model training and regular user queries, has been instrumental in ushering in the AI boom and in the U.S.’s leading position.
Few executives in Silicon Valley and beyond exert the level of power and influence over one company and industry. Huang’s institutional knowledge and deep industry connections have been among the reasons tech analysts and other experts said it would be impossible to replace him. Another reason has been President Trump, who has become a close friend of Huang and has stood by the executive since Sunday’s revelations, saying Huang is an “amazing guy” and “honorable man.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
原文: https://fortune.com/2026/11/11/nvidia-oust-jensen-huang-spy-affairs/
