Jensen Huang resigns as Nvidia CEO, Colette Kress named interim chief

Nvidia’s board accepted Jensen Huang’s resignation as president and chief executive on Wednesday, the company said Thursday — days after Huang admitted to a romantic affair with a woman alleged to be a Chinese spy, a disclosure that set off a U.S. national-security uproar. Chief financial officer and executive vice president Colette Kress takes over as interim CEO while continuing as CFO, until Nvidia finds a permanent successor.

Markets reacted immediately: Nvidia shares fell nearly 12% in early Thursday trading and have dropped as much as 19% since Friday, a decline that has erased more than $855 billion in market value. The board also named Harvey C. Jones, a Nvidia director since 1993 and managing partner at Square Wave Ventures, as the company’s first-ever board chair — a role likely to anchor the search for Huang’s permanent successor.

Nvidia, founded by Huang in 1993 and led by him ever since, grew from a struggling graphics-chip maker into the dominant supplier of processors for training and running AI models, after its chips proved adept at the parallel calculations neural networks require. Nvidia shares traded around $15 before ChatGPT’s debut sparked the AI boom; they surged more than 1,450% over the following years, touching an all-time high of $243 last month, which pushed Nvidia’s market capitalization up by $5.5 trillion to a peak of $5.88 trillion in early October. Revenue rose more than 1,500% to $96.22 billion by the company’s second quarter, up from $5.93 billion in the third quarter of 2023, while profit climbed nearly 88-fold to $59.69 billion.

Huang’s departure also lands as scrutiny intensifies on the web of financing deals he struck to fuel the AI buildout: as of its second quarter, Nvidia reported $99 billion in investments and another $25 billion in commitments, including $36 billion in cloud-service commitments, $30 billion invested in OpenAI, $10 billion in Anthropic, and up to $105 billion in credit guarantees backing an OpenAI data center in Ohio. Investors already uneasy about AI-infrastructure debt reacted to the resignation by selling shares of companies tied to Nvidia’s financing web: CoreWeave fell about 9% Thursday and Nebius dropped about 16%.

Why it matters

Huang’s abrupt exit removes the industry figure most responsible for underwriting the AI infrastructure boom through Nvidia’s own balance sheet, leaving open whether Kress or a permanent successor keeps financing deals and chip supply flowing at the same pace.