Jensen Huang Leaves Nvidia; Colette Kress Named Interim CEO

Nvidia announced Thursday that co-founder Jensen Huang has stepped down as the chipmaker's president, chief executive and a member of its board, effective immediately. A securities filing signed Thursday shows the directors accepted his resignation a day earlier, on Nov. 11.

Colette Kress, 59, the company's chief financial officer since September 2013, will run Nvidia on an interim basis while keeping her finance post. Before Nvidia she spent close to 25 years in finance jobs at Cisco, Microsoft and other technology firms. Directors will weigh both insiders and outside candidates as they hunt for a permanent successor.

Directors also made Harvey C. Jones, a former Synopsys chief executive who has sat on the board since 1993, Nvidia's first-ever chair. "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," Jones said.

The exit closes a 33-year run at the top of the company Huang helped found. It came four days after the board opened an independent investigation, saying on Sunday that it was acting "in light of recent reporting that founder and CEO Jensen Huang has been the target of a foreign intelligence effort." The board said at the time that it had "no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised." Beijing has rejected the spying allegations.

In a message to staff that same Sunday, Huang wrote, "I was unfaithful to my wife." The message named no one. He wrote that he backed the board's inquiry and would "cooperate fully."

News reports on the foreign intelligence allegations have centered on Alice Huang, a Hong Kong resident and former chief executive of Megaspeed International, a company incorporated in Singapore that bought Nvidia chips. She is not related to Jensen Huang. Singapore's Ministry of Home Affairs laid out its own handling of her case on Thursday. Singapore police seized her passport on June 24, 2025, the day the U.S. Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security ran a post-shipment check at Megaspeed with her present, and gave it back on Feb. 26, 2026, when she left the country. After consulting prosecutors, police found too little evidence to show she broke the law over the server purchase declarations under review, the ministry said. Police also assessed that she had knowingly given them inaccurate information to play down her role. She received a stern warning and may not return. The ministry said Singapore did not investigate her for espionage.

Singapore also said that since September 2025 it had asked the Justice Department and the FBI several times for help winning cooperation from Supermicro, a U.S. server supplier, and "has to date received limited information or assistance." Its investigation of Megaspeed and six other people continues.

President Trump, who on Monday called Huang "a very honorable man," turned to the succession Thursday morning. In a 10:29 a.m. Eastern post on Truth Social, he wrote that Huang "has done a fantastic job" and named Apple's Tim Cook as the "only one man to take his place." The post ended, "A Legend replaces a Legend!"

Nvidia stock opened Thursday at $150.99, more than 13 percent under Wednesday's close of $173.73, then clawed back much of the drop to finish at $166.19, a loss of 4.3 percent on the day. The shares closed October at $204.64 on Oct. 30. That $38.45 drop to Thursday's close, multiplied by the roughly 24.1 billion shares outstanding in Nvidia's August quarterly filing, comes to more than $900 billion in lost market value. On Oct. 29, 2025, Nvidia became the first company ever to close a session worth more than $5 trillion.

Third-quarter results remain on the calendar for Tuesday, Nov. 17, at about 4:20 p.m. Eastern, the company said.