Jensen Huang, who co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and has run it ever since, resigned as president, chief executive and board member on Thursday 12th November 2026, with immediate effect. Colette Kress, the company’s chief financial officer, is now interim CEO and keeps her finance job until the board names a permanent successor. Nvidia makes the graphics cards in gaming PCs and the AI chips that companies such as Microsoft and Google run in their data centres.
The announcement gives no reason for Huang’s departure and says nothing about whether he keeps any role. It does follow a difficult week. On Sunday 8th November he told staff in a memo that he had been unfaithful to his wife. “My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did,” he wrote. The memo named no one, but it came after claims that US officials believe Alice Huang, a former managing director at the Singapore data centre company Megaspeed, was recruited by China’s Ministry of State Security. When we covered the spying claim on Monday, no one had been charged and China’s foreign ministry had dismissed it as smears. On Wednesday a second relationship was reported, this time with an Nvidia executive who reports to Huang. The announcement mentions neither.
That same Sunday, the board opened an independent investigation into whether Huang had been “the target of a foreign intelligence effort”. It said it had no reason to believe national security or Nvidia’s secrets had been compromised, and that it had confidence in him. Four days later he had resigned, and the board has published no findings.
Kress has been Nvidia’s finance chief since September 2013. Before that she ran finance for a division of Cisco, and she spent 13 years at Microsoft and eight at Texas Instruments. Investors know her as the person who walks through the numbers on Nvidia’s quarterly earnings calls, and she leads the next one as CEO. Nvidia will report its third-quarter results on Tuesday 17th November 2026, as scheduled.
The board is searching for a permanent CEO and will consider people inside and outside the company. It has also given Nvidia its first-ever board chair, Harvey C. Jones, a former CEO and executive chairman of the chip design software company Synopsys. Jones said the board has “full confidence” in Kress and expects operations, customer commitments and the product roadmap to carry on without interruption. Investors were less certain, and Nvidia’s shares fell about 10% in trading before the US market opened on Thursday.
For people buying Nvidia hardware, the board says the roadmap stands, so the graphics cards and AI chips already announced should not be affected for now. The bigger risk is further out. Kress is a finance executive, Huang directed Nvidia’s engineering strategy himself, and the board has given no timeline for finding someone who can take that on. The earnings call on 17th November is the first chance to ask her how long the search will take.
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