Jensen Huang has resigned as chief executive of Nvidia Corp. on Thursday, effective immediately, ending a 33-year run atop the chipmaker he co-founded and sending its shares sharply lower before the opening bell.
Huang, 63, is also leaving the board. Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress will run the company on an interim basis while keeping her finance duties. Kress joined Nvidia as CFO in September 2013 after finance roles at Texas Instruments, Microsoft and Cisco.
Harvey C. Jones, a former CEO and executive chairman of Synopsys, becomes the board’s first-ever chair, and the board will consider internal and external candidates for the permanent job.
Nvidia stock was off 11.9% in premarket trading as of 9:14 a.m. Eastern, according to CNBC. Reuters reported that the drop added to a selloff that had already erased roughly $600 billion of the company’s market value this week.
The resignation followed a board meeting and came after days of damaging reports. On Sunday, Huang acknowledged an affair with Alice Huang, an executive at cloud company Megaspeed whom U.S. intelligence officials believe to be a Chinese spy, according to the Financial Times. On Wednesday, the New York Times reported a second relationship, with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of health care, who reports to Huang.
Megaspeed and Nvidia have denied wrongdoing, and when the board opened its independent investigation, it said it had no reason to believe national security or company secrets were compromised.
Pressure also came from Washington. Some lawmakers called for Huang to step down, and congressional leaders pressed for investigations into national security risks, while President Donald Trump called him “an honorable guy,” Reuters reported.
Huang steered Nvidia from a gaming-hardware company to the main supplier of the artificial-intelligence buildout. He owns about 3.6% of the stock and has dozens of direct reports, a structure Reuters said reflects how tightly he controlled the company.
Ryuta Makino, a software and semiconductor analyst at Gabelli Funds, doesn’t expect the shake-up to dent results soon. “In the near-term, I think NVDA will continue to perform as usual,” he said. “A lot of these deals and supply chain are already locked up.”
His concern lies later in the decade. Makino singled out 2029 and 2030, the period after Nvidia’s planned Feynman chip architecture, warning that lost market share could weigh on long-term AI infrastructure spending.
“I am still assessing the impact but there will definitely be a ripple effect to the AI supply chain given a lot of this was propped up by Jensen himself,” he said.
Giuseppe Sette, co-founder and president of AI investment analytics platform Reflexivity, sees the episode as a reminder that AI companies are not just a tech trade, but have spilled over into defense tech.
"Risking runaway general intelligence is ok, spilling secrets to other governments is not. In any case, a good day for accountability, and don't forget CEOs are natural revenants," Sette said.
While the most recent parade of earnings calls has raised hard questions around capex spending in the broader AI trade, Integrated Partners CIO Steve Kolano said the latest news from Nvidia "brings the idea of idiosyncratic, or company-specific, risk into the spotlight.
"The key going forward will be understanding the extent to which Jensen, at this point in the company’s life cycle, was serving as its spokesperson and media face versus still driving technological innovation," he said. "Investors will also want to understand the extent to which a new CEO could alter the company's strategic direction, specifically its capex plans related to AI."
The broader AI investment cycle remains intact as technology companies continue racing to build out their AI infrastructure," added etoro US Investment Analyst, Bret Kenwell. "One company’s leadership uncertainty should not be confused with the end of AI investment."
Mark Malek, CIO at Siebert Financial, said " name "the board did the sensible thing" by naming Kress as an interim successor, and the board chair appointment "fills a hole that should have been filled years ago."
"Longer term, it comes down to one hire. Customers who waited in line for these chips are not stepping out of it because a nameplate changed," he said. "What a new CEO CAN break is everything that hasn’t been built yet."
While the current leadership uncertainty will cast a fog over where Nvidia shares will go over the next few sessions, Ken Mahoney, president & CEO at Mahoney Asset Management argued the bearish news "could ultimately present an opportunity for investors with the appropriate time horizon.
"Nvidia remains a vitally important company with tremendous earnings power and a central role in the AI revolution," Mahoney said.
Investors will get an early read on the post-Huang company soon. Nvidia is scheduled to report third-quarter fiscal 2027 results on Tuesday, Nov. 17.
"Tuesday’s earnings call just became the most important in the company’s history," Malek said.
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