Jensen Huang resigns as NVIDIA CEO; CFO Colette Kress takes over as interim

In an 8-K filing dated 12 November, NVIDIA says the board accepted Jen-Hsun Huang's resignation on 11 November, effective immediately. Colette M. Kress, executive vice president and CFO since 2013, becomes interim CEO and keeps the finance role while the board searches for a permanent successor. Harvey C. Jones, a board member since 1993 and former Synopsys CEO, becomes the company's first-ever chair of the board. The press release does not mention the investigation or the affair.

Four days earlier, on 8 November, Huang wrote to NVIDIA staff that he had been unfaithful to his wife. Axios and The Washington Post published the apology. The same day, the board said it had opened an independent investigation into allegations that Huang had been the target of a foreign intelligence effort, and that it had no reason to believe national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised. CNBC, citing the New York Times and the Financial Times, named the woman as Alice Huang, affiliated with cloud company Megaspeed, an NVIDIA customer.

TechCrunch reports that NVIDIA shares fell nearly 12 percent on the morning of the resignation announcement, and by as much as 19 percent since the previous Friday, a market-cap loss of more than 855 billion dollars. Huang founded NVIDIA in 1993 and led it through the shift from gaming GPUs to the chips that train and run most frontier AI models. He remains the largest personal shareholder, at about 3.5 percent, without supervoting rights.

Earnings for the third quarter of fiscal 2027 are still scheduled for 17 November. The BBC reports that Huang has been asked to appear for a closed-door Congressional briefing on 18 November, and that he has not yet said whether he will attend. China has rejected the spying allegations as groundless, according to the same BBC report.

Two days before the resignation, NVIDIA announced OpenShell and other open-source agent infrastructure at KubeCon. The product roadmap and earnings call are unchanged, the board says.

Whether national security or company secrets were compromised is still under investigation. The board's first public line was that it had no reason to believe so.

What, if anything, Alice Huang passed to Beijing is not established in the open sources read here. Reuters reported claims that the relationship aided billions in chip shipments to China; those claims are contested and not confirmed by NVIDIA.

Who becomes permanent CEO, and what happens to NVIDIA's investments in labs and data centres, is open. The company has not named a succession plan.