Nvidia's board said on November 12 that Jensen Huang resigned as president, CEO and director, effective immediately. CFO Colette Kress is interim CEO while the board searches inside and outside the company, and former Synopsys CEO Harvey C. Jones becomes Nvidia's first board chair. Earnings stay on November 17.
Update, November 12, afternoon: Huang will answer lawmakers’ questions under oath. House Foreign Affairs Chairman Brian Mast said Huang agreed on Wednesday, hours before Nvidia announced his resignation and after lawmakers threatened a subpoena, to testify before Thanksgiving, according to Bloomberg as reported by Engadget. The session will likely be behind closed doors, filmed and transcribed, with the Intelligence and China committees joining. Inside Nvidia, Kress’s first email to staff as interim CEO, published by The Verge, calls this “an extraordinarily difficult period” and sets a company meeting for November 18 at 9 a.m. PT, the morning after earnings. Separately, Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs said Alice Huang is barred from re-entering the country, while police found insufficient evidence that she committed an offense over Megaspeed’s declarations, Engadget reports. The Megaspeed investigation continues. None of this changes the advice below.
Jensen Huang is no longer Nvidia’s CEO. The company’s board announced on November 12 that Huang resigned as president, chief executive and board member, effective immediately. Chief financial officer Colette Kress is interim CEO and keeps the CFO job until the board names a permanent successor. If you buy or run Nvidia hardware, nothing changes today: the board says operations, customer commitments and the product roadmap continue without interruption.
What Nvidia announced
The board’s statement makes four changes:
- Huang is out. He resigned all three roles at once, ending 33 years running the company he co-founded in 1993.
- Kress is interim CEO. She joined Nvidia as CFO in September 2013 after nearly 25 years in finance roles at Cisco and Microsoft, according to the release.
- A search has started. The board will consider internal and external candidates for a permanent CEO. It gave no timeline.
- Nvidia has a board chair for the first time. Harvey C. Jones, a former CEO and executive chairman of Synopsys, takes the new role.
Third-quarter fiscal 2027 results stay on Tuesday, November 17, at about 1:20 p.m. Pacific, with the earnings call at 2 p.m. Pacific (5 p.m. Eastern).
The release quotes Jones and Kress. It carries no quote from Huang, a detail The Verge noted. As of Thursday morning Eastern, Huang had made no public statement about leaving.
Why it happened, according to reporting
The board did not give a reason. The resignation follows two weeks of reporting:
- Late October and November 6: The New York Times and the Financial Times reported that Huang had a relationship with Alice Huang (no relation), an executive at Singapore cloud provider Megaspeed, an Nvidia customer, and that she worked for China’s Ministry of State Security, according to Wired. China rejects that claim.
- November 8: The board opened an independent investigation, and Huang emailed employees admitting he was unfaithful to his wife. We covered both in our story on the board’s probe.
- November 11: The Times reported a second relationship, with an Nvidia vice president who reports to him. The Wall Street Journal and then Bloomberg reported that the board was preparing to replace him, as covered in our story on those reports.
A source familiar with the matter told Wired that the relationship with a subordinate and Huang’s business dealings with Megaspeed likely weighed more in the board’s decision than the espionage allegations. That is one unnamed source. Nvidia has not explained the decision.
The market reaction was immediate. Nvidia fell 14% at Thursday’s open, wiping out more than $600 billion in value and taking its market cap below $4 trillion for the first time since 2025, according to Bloomberg as summarized by Techmeme.
What to do
- If you own or plan to buy an Nvidia GPU or laptop, change nothing. No product, price, driver or warranty change has been announced, and the board says the roadmap continues as planned.
- If your team depends on Nvidia data center allocation, ask your account rep this week. The board’s promise covers customer commitments. Get your delivery dates confirmed in writing before the November 17 call.
- If you hold the stock, the November 17 call is the first chance to hear Kress answer questions as CEO and CFO at once.
Who the board might pick
Nvidia says it will look inside and outside the company. Names reported so far include Kress herself, Nvidia VP and CUDA creator Ian Buck, Apple hardware chief Johny Srouji, AMD CEO Lisa Su and Arm CEO Rene Haas, according to The Verge, which compiled them from earlier reports. None of them has commented, and Nvidia has named no shortlist. Treat the list as speculation.
Kress runs both the company and the books during earnings week
This section is our inference. Kress is the executive investors already hear from every quarter, which is why a CFO is a common interim pick: she knows the numbers, the customers and the supply contracts. The cost is that one person now carries the CEO and CFO jobs through an earnings report, an internal investigation run by outside counsel and a congressional briefing that House committee chairs requested for November 18.
The new chair role matters as much as the interim CEO. Until today the founder sat on the board and the board had no chair. Giving the directors their own leader for the search suggests the next CEO will answer to the board more directly than Huang did.
For hardware buyers, short-term product risk stays low, because GPU roadmaps are set years ahead. The bigger exposure is policy. Huang was the company’s loudest voice against US export controls on China, and the scandal centers on a Megaspeed relationship that lawmakers already want explained. A successor with less personal pull in Washington could mean tighter China licensing rules, and that would change allocation and lead times well before it changes any spec sheet.