Jensen Huang Resigns as Nvidia CEO: Kress Named Interim

Jensen Huang is no longer Nvidia’s CEO. Nvidia announced Thursday that he has resigned as president, chief executive and a board member, effective immediately. A regulatory filing says the board accepted the resignation on Wednesday night, PCMag reports, the same evening it was reported to be meeting on his future.

Who runs Nvidia now

Colette Kress, the company’s CFO since September 2013, is interim CEO and keeps the CFO title. A permanent CEO search is underway, and the board says it will consider internal and external candidates. Harvey C. Jones, a former CEO and executive chairman of Synopsys, becomes Nvidia’s first-ever board chair.

Until Thursday, Nvidia had no board chair at all, according to Fortune.

Jones said in the release that the board has “full confidence in Colette and the leadership team,” and expects “operations, customer commitments and product roadmap to continue without interruption.” Kress’s statement is shorter. She is “committed to building on the extraordinary foundation Jensen created over the last 33 years.”

Nvidia still plans to report third-quarter fiscal 2027 results on Tuesday, November 17, which leaves Kress about five days before her first earnings call as interim chief. That call is the first real test of the arrangement.

Three days from confidence to resignation

On Sunday, November 8, the board said it had “no reason to believe” that national security or Nvidia’s secrets were compromised, and that it still had confidence in Huang, according to CNN. That was the day Huang acknowledged being unfaithful to his wife. Our November 8 post covers that week in detail.

On Wednesday, the New York Times reported a second relationship, this time with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of healthcare. Citing five people who worked at the company, the Times said Powell reports to Huang, and The Verge carried that account. Separately, the Wall Street Journal reported the board was preparing to oust him and could meet as soon as that evening. Fortune cites the Journal for that report. According to The Guardian, Huang denies knowing the woman was working for the Chinese government. Earlier that week, Trump had called him “an honorable guy.”

My read: the Sunday statement was written for a story about a spy. Once the story became about a direct report, the word “confidence” was hard to keep, and the board didn’t try. CNBC quoted Bernstein’s Stacy Rasgon saying an affair with a direct report makes it “much tougher for the board to leave him in position.” That is the pressure the board faced on Wednesday, and it wasn’t the pressure it faced on Sunday.

What the stock did

Sources disagree on how far the stock fell, mostly because they quote different points in the session.

Source	Move reported	When
CNN	More than 10%	Premarket Thursday
CNBC	Nearly 10%, market value below $4 trillion	Thursday session
Investopedia	Down 13%	Early trading Thursday
BBC live blog	More than 13%	At the US market open

After hours on Wednesday, the stock was already down more than 9%, according to Fortune. CNBC noted it had fallen more than 20% over the previous month. Bernstein cut its price target from $400 to $200 on Thursday, per CNBC. I didn’t find a Thursday closing price in the pages I read, so treat these as intraday numbers and check a price feed for the close.

My read: the drop reflects the leadership gap as much as the scandal. Gil Luria of D.A. Davidson told Fortune that the factors behind Huang’s removal “hasten a transition the company is not prepared for.” That’s the line I’d watch if I held the stock.

My read

Nvidia’s release is short. It doesn’t mention the affairs, the memo, the spy assessment or the investigation. For a company this size, that silence tells you the board is treating this as a leadership decision, not an explanation. Anyone wanting the explanation has to read the reporting.

Kress is the obvious interim pick. She has run the numbers and the investor relationship for more than a decade, and the release leans on that. But Rasgon’s question is still open: “Who is the right person now to make the decisions for the next 10 years? I don’t intuitively know who that person would be.”

What I don’t know: whether the House committees still expect Huang to brief them on November 18, now that he is no longer CEO. The release doesn’t say, and the committees’ letter asked for that briefing from Huang while he was still CEO. The next things to watch are Nvidia’s November 17 call and whether the company says anything about the search timeline, not only about operations continuing without interruption.

A note on sources: I read Nvidia’s release, CNN, Fortune and Investopedia in full, and CNBC’s opening section. The Verge, The Guardian, PCMag and the BBC live page I read only through their search summaries, so I cite them only for what those summaries show. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal originals are paywalled. I cite their reporting through Fortune, The Verge and CNBC.

Related: for what Huang’s exit means for AI startup funding, see our follow-up on the funding gap VCs are describing.

Related: our November 8 post on the board’s investigation and Huang’s apology, and our November 7 post on the spy memo, which covers the congressional briefing request. Also Democrats opened a records probe into the H200 China deal the same day, and a separate forensic report found Blackwell fingerprints in Chinese labs’ model weights the week Huang left.