Jensen Huang, the longtime CEO and co-founder of artificial intelligence (AI) chip giant NVIDIA Corp., resigned Thursday following a tumultuous week marked by a federal national security investigation and disclosures of two extramarital affairs.
Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress has been appointed interim CEO while the board of directors conducts a search for a permanent successor, considering both internal and external candidates. To bolster corporate governance during the transition, the board also named venture investor and former Synopsys CEO Harvey C. Jones as NVIDIA’s first-ever independent board chair.
The leadership shake-up sent tremors through Wall Street. NVIDIA shares tumbled 14% at the opening bell Thursday before paring some losses to trade down roughly 7%, dragging the tech-heavy Nasdaq down 1.5%. Over the past week alone, the approximately $4 trillion chipmaker has shed roughly $600 billion in market value as the scandal unfolded.
Huang’s spectacular fall and departure brings an abrupt end to his 33-year tenure at the helm of the company he co-founded, which became the dominant supplier of processors powering the global AI boom. His position became untenable after media reports late Wednesday revealed he had engaged in an extramarital relationship with a subordinate, Kimberly Powell, NVIDIA’s vice president of healthcare.
That revelation compounded an already escalating crisis triggered on Nov. 8, when NVIDIA announced its independent directors had retained outside legal counsel to investigate whether Huang had been targeted by a foreign intelligence operation.
In a memo to staff, Huang admitted to being unfaithful to his wife, apologized to his family and colleagues, and pledged full cooperation with the board’s inquiry.
The national security probe centers on Huang’s relationship with Alice Huang (no relation), a former executive at Singapore-based tech firm Megaspeed International.
U.S. intelligence officials suspect Alice Huang of acting as an agent for Beijing and feeding information to Chinese authorities while facilitating illicit shipments of advanced NVIDIA chips to Chinese firms. On Sunday, President Donald Trump announced that the FBI had opened an investigation into the matter.
According to Singaporean authorities, officials questioned Alice Huang and confiscated her passport last year during an investigation into Megaspeed.
Though Singapore declined to bring criminal charges due to insufficient evidence, it barred her from returning to the country. She has since relocated to Beijing with the knowledge of Chinese security officials. China has denied attempting to ensnare the NVIDIA chief.
In its first public statement since the scandal erupted, Megaspeed — whose assets surged nearly 90-fold to almost $3 billion between late 2023 and 2024 — denied wrongdoing. Chairman and CEO Tan Yong Pong said Thursday that the firm takes U.S. export control laws “extremely seriously,” is cooperating with the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, and has hired a U.S. law firm to conduct a comprehensive audit of its chip inventory.
The implications of Huang’s potential entanglement with a Chinese spy ring extend to the Trump administration and the president, whose close ties to the NVIDIA CEO intensified over the past year.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is facing bipartisan scrutiny on Capitol Hill following reports that he repeatedly stalled efforts to block suspected third-party diversions of advanced NVIDIA AI chips to China.
According to administration officials cited by multiple news outlets, President Donald Trump approved crackdowns on suspected chip diverters three separate times this year — in May, August, and early November. Yet Lutnick delayed placing Singapore-based computing firm Megaspeed, which purchased over $4 billion in NVIDIA semiconductors, onto a federal export blacklist, warning that the move could spark a broader trade war with Beijing.
A Commerce Department spokesperson denied reports of internal White House clashes over the delays.
The stalled enforcement has sparked sharp national security and economic concerns. Lawmakers warn that allowing high-end hardware to reach Chinese entities through intermediaries accelerates Beijing’s military modernization and AI capabilities while draining scarce computing supply from U.S. firms.
The controversy has also intensified scrutiny of Lutnick’s former firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, over its NVIDIA holdings, and compounded fallout from Jensen Huang’s acknowledged relationship with a Megaspeed executive suspected of ties to Chinese intelligence — a dual crisis that has rattled markets and prompted congressional demands for document preservation and hearings.
NVIDIA has maintained that it has “no reason to believe” U.S. national security or proprietary secrets were compromised, though its board review remains ongoing.
The controversy is particularly sensitive given Huang’s prominent role in lobbying Washington to ease export restrictions, an effort that secured White House approval in January to sell NVIDIA’s H200 chips to China.
As NVIDIA navigates the leadership vacuum, Kress — who has served as CFO since 2013 following stints at Cisco and Microsoft — sought to steady the company’s workforce. She is scheduled to address employees directly on Nov. 18, a day after the company announces its quarterly financial results. (NVIDIA’s board is consulting an outside search firm to identify potential replacements for Huang.)
“The Board, staff and I recognize that this has been an extraordinarily difficult period and I want you to know how grateful we are for your resilience,” Kress wrote in a Thursday memo to employees. “We play a vital role in building the technology that is powering the AI revolution, and we have important work ahead of us.”
In a separate letter to staff, new board chair Jones credited Huang for his “profound” contributions to the industry while expressing “full confidence” in Kress’s ability to lead the company forward.
Industry analysts said the search for a permanent CEO — potential candidates range from AMD Inc. CEO Lisa Su (possible) to former Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook (highly unlikely) — will be crucial not only to the long-term success of NVIDIA but the overall AI industry, which is dominated and dependent on the chipmaker.
Lindsey Stewart, Morningstar’s director of institutional investor content, warned the sudden CEO exit exposes the financial risks of unconventional governance structures. Stewart noted that NVIDIA’s surging share price previously overshadowed deeper scrutiny into succession planning, board oversight, and geopolitically sensitive strategies.
Those governance questions are now expected to take center stage — not only for NVIDIA, Stewart said, but across other founder-led tech giants, including Anthropic, Meta Platforms Inc., and SpaceX.
“We certainly believe NVIDIA without Jensen is not the same NVIDIA. That said, this is an exceptionally well-run organization with extraordinary engineering depth, a deeply entrenched ecosystem, and demand for its products that continue to significantly outpace supply. None of those fundamentals have changed,” said Lior Prosor, a partner at Deep33.
While no CEO is irreplaceable, the sudden ouster of Jensen Huang poses significant operational risks.
Tech analyst Jack Gold noted that NVIDIA lacks a clear succession plan because Huang largely structured the company around himself without an obvious leadership team to step in. The abrupt exit could disrupt management performance, bottleneck research and development, and slow new technology deployments. Over time, these internal challenges could allow rivals to catch up and erode NVIDIA’s market dominance.
“The bottom line is uncertainty,” Gold said, noting that markets and customers paying a premium to work with the chipmaker dislike instability.
“Other U.S. tech leaders are now going to have step in up even more as visionaries with Jensen gone, including Nadella, Sundar, Cook, Dario, Zuckerberg, Altman, Karp, Jassey, Su, Nikesh, Kurtz and many others,” said Wall Street analyst Dan Ives, who lowered his price target on NVIDIA shares to $225 from $300 following Huang’s exit. In previous notes to investors, Ives often referred to Huang as the “Godfather of AI.”
