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Artificial Intelligence/13 November 2026

Jensen Huang resigns as Nvidia president, CEO and a director, effective immediately

Nvidia's board accepted Jensen Huang's resignation as president, chief executive and a director on 11 November, and named finance chief Colette Kress interim CEO.

By JP Caparas··13 minute read
An empty concert hall with a vacant wooden lectern under a spotlight, and a square enamel plaque of the official Nvidia eye on the right-hand balcony.

At a glance

  • Nvidia's board accepted Jensen Huang's resignation as president, chief executive and a director on 11 November, effective immediately, and announced it the next day.
  • CFO Colette Kress, who joined in 2013, is interim CEO and keeps the finance role while the board searches internally and externally for a permanent successor.
  • Harvey C. Jones, a director since 1993 and a former Synopsys chief executive, is the board's first chair.
  • The 12 November announcement does not state a reason. On 8 November the board had opened an independent investigation after reporting that Huang had been the target of a foreign intelligence effort.
  • Nvidia will still report its third-quarter fiscal 2027 results on 17 November, as previously scheduled, and Kress has called a company meeting for the next day.

Nvidia’s board accepted Jensen Huang’s resignation as president, chief executive and a director on 11 November, effective immediately, according to a Form 8-K filed the next day. The company announced the change on 12 November. In the filing, he is named Jen-Hsun Huang.

Colette Kress, Nvidia’s executive vice president and chief financial officer since September 2013, has been appointed interim chief executive and will keep the finance role until a permanent successor is named. The board says it will consider internal and external candidates. The 8-K records Kress’s age as 59. Before Nvidia, the company says, she spent nearly 25 years in finance roles at firms including Cisco and Microsoft.

The board also appointed Harvey C. Jones as its first chair. Jones has served on the board since 1993, the filing says, and is 73. The announcement describes him as an entrepreneur, technology executive and venture investor, and as a former chief executive and executive chairman of Synopsys. The 8-K says he has been managing partner of Square Wave Ventures, a private family office, since 2004.

“Colette has helped lead NVIDIA through a period of extraordinary growth and has a deep understanding of our business, customers, operations and financial position,” Jones said in the company’s release. “The Board has full confidence in Colette and the leadership team, and we expect the company’s operations, customer commitments and product roadmap to continue without interruption.”

“NVIDIA’s strength has always come from its people, and together with our leadership team, I am committed to building on the extraordinary foundation Jensen created over the last 33 years,” Kress said. The release thanks Huang for his contributions and does not include a statement from him.

The announcement does not state a reason for the resignation. On 8 November, Nvidia’s board said it was opening an independent investigation, overseen by a committee of independent directors and outside counsel, after reporting that Huang had been the target of a foreign intelligence effort. At the time, the board said it had no reason to believe that national security or Nvidia secrets had been compromised, that Huang supported the review, and that it had confidence in him and his leadership team. In a staff email published by CNBC that day, Huang apologised for being unfaithful to his wife, said he supported the investigation and would cooperate fully, and asked for privacy for his family. The 12 November release and the 8-K do not say what happens to that inquiry.

The Associated Press reported that Huang resigned after an affair raised national-security concerns, and that Nvidia shares fell about 10% in pre-market trading. The Financial Times said he was leaving after revelations of two extramarital affairs. Those accounts go beyond what Nvidia has stated.

House committee chairs had asked Huang for a closed-door briefing, proposed for 18 November, about the earlier reporting. The new announcement does not address that request. A public-record review of the allegations, Nvidia’s responses and what can be tested from company filings is published separately.

Huang is now willing to appear before Congress as soon as next week, House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Brian Mast told reporters after the resignation, according to CNBC. Mast said Huang’s team got back to the committees on Wednesday night and they’re negotiating a date. The format hasn’t been settled, and he said a subpoena is still an option if talks break down.

Senator Elizabeth Warren said the resignation doesn’t end the matter, and that Huang and other Nvidia executives still owe Congress an explanation of the company’s compliance with export controls.

Nvidia shares fell more than 13% at the open on 12 November, pushing its market value below US$4 trillion, CNBC reported. The stock had closed at US$173.73 the day before, well down from its closing high of US$239.24 on 6 October. Companies Nvidia has invested in, including Intel and Marvell, also fell, while rival AMD rose. At least 10 Wall Street analysts had turned more bearish during the week, according to FactSet data cited by CNBC. Stifel cut its price target to US$205 from US$315 but kept a buy rating. Baird cut its target from US$500 to US$200 and downgraded the stock to neutral until questions about likely US government action are settled.

Analysts have named internal candidates for the permanent job, including Ian Buck, who runs Nvidia’s hyperscale business, chief scientist Bill Dally and chief technology officer Michael Kagan. Creative Strategies chief executive Ben Bajarin told CNBC he sees Buck as the most logical pick, and that an insider is probably better than an outsider. Yorkville Ives analyst Dan Ives told the network before the announcement that Kress could steady the ship, but the longer-term choice would probably come from outside.

President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social that Apple chief executive Tim Cook should take over. Before the announcement, Atreides Management’s Gavin Baker posted that large shareholders had been calling him to say the board should wait for the investigation’s results, and that he agreed. Elon Musk, whose SpaceX is a major Nvidia customer, had replied that hiring Huang would be an honour. Afterwards, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao wrote that letting Huang resign was a mistake.

Inside the company, Jones and Kress wrote to staff after the announcement, in emails obtained by CNBC and published in full by The Verge. Jones told employees that Kress had been “a key architect of NVIDIA’s growth and capital strategy” and that “Jensen’s contributions to NVIDIA are profound.” Kress wrote that “The Board, Estaff and I recognize that this has been an extraordinarily difficult period,” and said Nvidia will hold a company meeting on 18 November at 9am Pacific time, the day after its results.

A person familiar with the matter told CNBC the board made its call the night before the announcement, after a further report about Huang’s private life, and confirmed it the next morning before naming Kress. The same outlet reported that Kress was gathering Nvidia’s executive team at its Santa Clara headquarters to talk through leadership and continuity. The investigation the board opened on 8 November is being run with the law firm Wachtell Lipton, CNBC said. Nvidia hasn’t said whether it’ll publish the findings.

Mast later told reporters that Huang has agreed to testify before Thanksgiving, CNBC reported. He said the session would likely be under oath and transcribed, with several committees involved. In the Senate, Majority Leader John Thune said he expects follow-up oversight. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called for a classified briefing for members and said the resignation “was the right thing to do.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Congress still needs answers from Huang and Nvidia, and from the Trump administration. Senator Ron Wyden and Representative Richard Neal, the senior Democrats on the tax-writing committees, have opened a separate inquiry into the Commerce Department’s approval of Nvidia chip exports to Chinese government-linked companies.

More analysts weighed in once the news broke. Bernstein’s Stacy Rasgon said he found it hard to back buying the stock in size, because “there will no doubt be more allegations to come.” KeyBanc’s John Vinh wrote that the departure “represents a material increase in strategic, organizational, and execution risk,” even though he expects demand to hold up. Janus Henderson portfolio manager Jeremiah Buckley took the other side, telling CNBC that “this could be a clearing event for the company.” Small investors bought the dip hard. Vanda Research said retail traders put a net US$111 million into Nvidia in the first 30 minutes of trading, the biggest opening bid from individual traders it has ever recorded.

There’s legal pressure too. Rosen Law Firm has filed a proposed class action on behalf of shareholders, and its attorney Phillip Kim told CNBC several hundred investors had been in touch within days. University of Colorado law professor Ann Lipton said the resignation “will strengthen any shareholder claims regarding damages,” and that the board needs to move swiftly on a succession plan.

Some founders who work closely with Nvidia were more personal. Hugging Face chief executive Clément Delangue, whose company Nvidia agreed in September to buy, called it “a really sad day” on LinkedIn and said Hugging Face would keep pushing for open-source AI. Perplexity chief executive Aravind Srinivas thanked Huang on X for 33 years of “bold leadership” and said his “personal generosity with time and advice to founders” should be remembered.

Huang has hired his own lawyers. CNBC confirmed he’s retained the law firm Paul Weiss, which The New York Times reported first, naming litigators Melinda Haag and Walter Brown. It isn’t clear yet what the firm has been brought in to do.

Some of the criticism is landing on the board itself. Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, who studies leadership at the Yale School of Management, told CNBC that Huang had become a “monarch” so closely tied to the brand that nobody could separate him from the company, and that “no one was equipped to step in.” Before he left, Huang was one of 11 directors on a board with no chair. CNBC found that none of the other 10 is a current or former S&P 500 chief executive, and that they’ve served an average of 15 years, roughly double the 7.8-year average for independent directors across the S&P 500 in Conference Board data.

Cantor Fitzgerald analyst CJ Muse called the exit “a major loss for Nvidia and also a major loss for the United States,” and cut his price target to US$250 from US$350 while keeping an overweight rating. Cloud providers that rent out Nvidia chips were hit too. CNBC reported CoreWeave down nearly 12%, IREN down 8% and Nebius down 17%, though Nebius had also given weak guidance with its results that day. Former US banking regulator Sheila Bair told the network Nvidia isn’t “too big to fail in a bank sense at all.”

Outside the Santa Clara headquarters, supporters left bouquets of flowers and at least one candle at the Nvidia sign, Getty Images photos showed.

Nvidia ended 12 November down 4.3%, CNBC reported. It hit a new 52-week low early in the session but clawed back much of the fall, finishing just above US$4 trillion in market value after spending most of the day below that mark. The Financial Times’s Lex column said the saga had already wiped about US$600 billion off Nvidia’s value since the previous Friday, and argued it should push tech investors to rethink their faith in charismatic founders.

Trump came back to the subject in an interview with conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt, CNBC reported. Talking about America’s lead in AI, he mentioned a science award he’d given Huang and others, then said: “what a horrible thing that is! That’s so sad to see that happen.”

The board’s own inquiry is led by Joon H. Kim, a former acting US attorney for the Southern District of New York, the independent directors said on 10 November. Kim, 55, joined Wachtell Lipton recently and was one of two lawyers picked in 2021 to investigate then-New York governor Andrew Cuomo. Edward Kim, a white-collar defence lawyer who worked alongside him as a prosecutor, told CNBC he expects “a serious, credible investigation.” Nvidia didn’t immediately say whether the latest reports would widen its scope, CNBC said.

Lawmakers are also moving on chip exports. Thune told Semafor there’s a “high probability” Congress puts more limits on sales to China. Three bills sit in the Senate’s version of the annual defence policy bill, the NDAA. The Chip Security Act aims to stop AI chips being smuggled, partly by checking where they end up. The MATCH Act targets loopholes around chipmaking equipment and allied countries’ export rules. The AI Overwatch Act would give Congress oversight of Commerce licences to sell chips to countries of concern, including China. Thune and Senate Armed Services chair Roger Wicker said there’s no deal yet to keep them in the final bill. House Speaker Mike Johnson said there’s “a developing consensus in Congress” for tighter rules, and Jeffries said Democrats will keep investigating once they take control of both chambers in January.

The fallout reached China’s grey market for Nvidia chips. A trader told CNBC that people moving advanced American chips to Chinese AI companies had been told to pause work into next week, partly because they expect closer US scrutiny when Trump arrives in Shenzhen for the APEC leaders’ meeting on 18 November. “This year the controls have already been extremely strict,” the trader said. “They will likely get even stricter.” Listings seen by CNBC price a set of eight Blackwell B300 chips at 20 million yuan, about US$2.99 million, roughly five times the May price and nearly six times the official US price. Shares in Chinese AI companies also slid on worries that access to Nvidia chips could tighten.

For most everyday investors, the hit is smaller than the headlines suggest. Nvidia made up about 8.4% of the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF at the end of September, so a 10% fall in Nvidia’s shares would knock about 0.84% off the fund, all else equal, according to an analysis by Experiential Wealth reported by CNBC. “It’s not a big deal,” said Philip Chao, the firm’s chief investment officer. “Most people are just reacting to the sensational aspect of this [news].”

Bloomberg reported that stepping down will cost Huang about US$108 million in unvested shares. Ark Invest’s Cathie Wood told Yahoo Finance that Nvidia’s bench runs deeper than its founder: “This cannot just be the Jensen show every time he got on stage.”

Another Senate committee wants to hear from Huang. Banking Committee chair Tim Scott has asked him and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to testify in public, on 3 December and 10 December respectively, CNBC reported. In his letter to Huang, Scott wrote that if he doesn’t appear voluntarily, “the Committee is prepared to use all tools at our disposal, including subpoenas, to conduct this legitimate and necessary oversight.”

Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, wants Congress to look hard at Nvidia’s finances as well. He said the company “has backstopped the AI ecosystem through complex financing transactions. We need full transparency into these deals, an assessment of whether the company is ‘too big to fail,’ and an analysis of how these events may affect the US banking system and credit markets,” Reuters reported.

Trump had tried to keep Huang in the job. He called Huang on Tuesday and urged him to fight for it, The New York Times reported, citing two people briefed on the call. In a White House interview with broadcaster Stephen A. Smith after the resignation, Trump said Huang had rung him to express remorse over what the scandal had done to his family, and called him a “legend”, Bloomberg reported.

The national-security question hasn’t been settled. Attorney General Todd Blanche said the Justice Department hasn’t yet reached a conclusion on whether the Chinese businesswoman reported to have had an affair with Huang was a spy, Reuters reported.

Nvidia says it will still report its third-quarter fiscal 2027 financial results on 17 November, as previously scheduled.

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