NVIDIA Founder Jensen Huang Steps Aside After 33 Years Leading the Chip Giant

NVIDIA’s board confirmed Thursday that co-founder Jensen Huang has resigned as president, chief executive officer, and director, effective immediately. Colette Kress, the company’s longtime executive vice president and chief financial officer, will serve as interim CEO while continuing in her finance role. The board has begun a search for a permanent replacement and will review both internal and external candidates. Harvey C. Jones, a longtime director and former Synopsys chief executive, has been named the company’s first board chair.

Huang co-founded NVIDIA in 1993 and held the CEO position for an incredible 33 years, transforming the graphics-chip company into the go-to supplier of processors powering big-league AI systems. Under his guidance, the company catapulted to trillion-dollar valuations and became a must-have for all data centers, cloud enterprises, and AI companies around the world. And, yes, he still owns a significant amount of shares in the corporation.

It’s been days of rigorous interrogation since November 8th, when the board announced that an independent investigation would be launched in response to reports that a foreign intelligence agency was targeting Huang. Now, those rumors focused on Huang’s affair with Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, a Chinese businesswoman who previously worked as an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based data center provider. The alleged story was that she was picked up by China’s Ministry of State Security at some time. Huang admitted to workers in a message that he had been unfaithful to his missus. At the time, the corporation stated that there was no reason to suspect that national security or company secrets had been exposed.


On November 11th, further investigation revealed that he had also been having an affair with Kimberly Powell, who happens to work at NVIDIA as the VP of Healthcare and is married to someone else. Apparently, the couple has been seen getting all lovey-dovey on multiple occasions, including the company’s developer conference earlier this year. The board finally met on Wednesday, and Huang left Thursday morning.

When trading began on Thursday, NVIDIA shares dropped by more than 12%. This effectively ended a streak of losses that began when all of this was revealed. Since the incident began, the company’s market worth has plummeted by hundreds of billions. Despite this, the corporation was still planning to reveal its third-quarter 2027 results on November 17th.

Kress has been NVIDIA’s CFO since 2013, following stints at Cisco and Microsoft. She issued a statement stating that the firm would continue to work on accelerated computing and AI while keeping its customers, partners, developers, and shareholders in mind, as one might anticipate. Meanwhile, Board Chair Jones was confident that day-to-day operations would proceed smoothly.

Huang is gone, but there is no permanent replacement in place. There are some internal candidates they may consider, such as Kress and some of the senior IT leaders, but the board is keeping all options open. It’s going to be a major thing for a company that’s so strongly attached to its founder to simply up and lose its original leader like this after an unbelievable 33 years.