Jensen Huang Resigns as NVIDIA CEO; CFO Colette Kress Steps In

Jensen Huang has resigned as president and chief executive of NVIDIA and left its board, effective immediately, the company said on Thursday in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Chief financial officer Colette Kress becomes interim CEO, and former Synopsys CEO Harvey C. Jones becomes the company's first board chair.

Key Takeaways

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• Huang, who co-founded NVIDIA in 1993, resigned as CEO, president and director on November 12, effective immediately.
• CFO Colette Kress is interim CEO and keeps her CFO role while the board searches internal and external candidates for a permanent successor.
• The resignation follows New York Times reports of an affair with a former Megaspeed International executive whom US officials concluded was a Chinese intelligence asset, and a second relationship with an NVIDIA executive.
• NVIDIA shares fell as much as 14% after Thursday's open. The company says operations, customer commitments and the product roadmap will continue without interruption.

Why Huang left

NVIDIA's announcement does not mention the allegations, and Huang is not quoted in it. The board says only that "Jensen's contributions to NVIDIA are profound."

The resignation follows a series of New York Times reports. The first described an affair between Huang and Alice Huang, a former executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed International. According to the Times, US officials had concluded that she was a Chinese spy recruited to push NVIDIA to make its most advanced chips more available in China. The FBI is reportedly investigating. Huang apologized to employees on Sunday, and on Wednesday night the Times reported a second relationship, with an NVIDIA executive.

NVIDIA's board has hired the law firm Wachtell Lipton to investigate the intelligence allegations. Representative Brian Mast, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said Huang has agreed to testify before Congress before Thanksgiving, possibly as soon as next week.

Shares fell as much as 14% shortly after Thursday's open before recovering part of the loss. They had closed Wednesday at $173.73, about 27% below their closing high of $239.24 on October 6.

Who runs NVIDIA now

Kress has been NVIDIA's CFO since September 2013 and will hold both jobs until a permanent CEO is named. Jones, a venture investor, was previously CEO and executive chairman of Synopsys. NVIDIA has never had a separate board chair before.

"We expect the company's operations, customer commitments and product roadmap to continue without interruption," Jones said in the announcement, which describes NVIDIA's business only in terms of accelerated computing and AI and does not mention robotics.

What is in flight on the robotics side

Huang made humanoid robots a regular part of his keynotes, and NVIDIA's robotics business has grown into a long list of humanoid initiatives, partnerships and investments. It spans the Isaac GR00T robot models, the Cosmos world models, Jetson Thor onboard computers, the Halos safety architecture built with Agility, a GR00T reference humanoid with Sharpa, and partners such as LG, which plans a GR00T-based humanoid for early 2027. A few examples of what is scheduled or pending right now:

• GR00T 2. Three days ago at CoRL, NVIDIA's Jim Fan presented GR00T 2, a 2-billion-parameter model. NVIDIA said the weights will be released in December.
• Hugging Face. The $12.93 billion acquisition of Hugging Face, owner of the LeRobot project and Pollen Robotics, has not closed. The Justice Department is reviewing it, and the companies expect it to close in the first half of 2027.
• Partners. NVIDIA invested in the $500 million Series F that Agile Robots announced on the same day as Huang's resignation, and The Information reported in October that NVIDIA had discussed another $1 billion investment in Figure. Agile Robots' research humanoid and the robots of UK startup Humanoid are built around NVIDIA's Jetson Thor computer.

NVIDIA will report third-quarter fiscal 2027 results on Tuesday, November 17, as previously scheduled. It will be the company's first earnings call without Huang as CEO.