Jensen Huang is out at Nvidia. The company said Thursday that Huang has resigned as president, CEO and a member of the board, “effective immediately,” according to its filing with the SEC. Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress will serve as interim CEO while keeping her CFO job, and the board will search inside and outside the company for a permanent replacement.
Huang co-founded Nvidia 33 years ago and turned it into the company that makes the chips behind almost every big AI system. His exit comes days after the board opened an investigation into his relationship with a woman U.S. intelligence officials suspect is a Chinese spy.
Why did Jensen Huang resign?
Nvidia’s announcement doesn’t give a reason. But here’s what’s been reported. On Sunday, Huang apologized for being “unfaithful to my wife.” The woman involved, businesswoman Alice Huang, has worked for Megaspeed, a Chinese company that buys Nvidia chips, and she is “believed by the U.S. intelligence community to be a Chinese spy,” CNBC reported. Huang has denied that he compromised national security or company secrets.
Then on Wednesday night, the New York Times reported a second affair, with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of health care. The board had already hired the law firm Wachtell Lipton to look into the intelligence questions. By Thursday morning, Huang was gone.
Who is Colette Kress, and who runs Nvidia now?
Kress has been Nvidia’s CFO since 2013 and is the person Wall Street already knows best after Huang. “NVIDIA’s strength has always come from its people,” she said in the company’s statement. The board also named Harvey C. Jones, a former Synopsys CEO, as its first-ever chair. “The Board has full confidence in Colette and the leadership team,” Jones said, adding that he expects operations and the product roadmap “to continue without interruption.”
Analyst Dan Ives told CNBC Kress is the right choice “to steady the ship,” but expects the long-term pick to come from outside, probably in about a year.
What does this mean for Nvidia stock and your 401(k)?
Nvidia stock plunged more than 13% at the open Thursday, pushing its market value below $4 trillion and putting it on pace for its worst day since January 2025, CNBC reported. Shares had closed at $173.73 on Wednesday, already well below their October high of $239.24.
That matters even if you’ve never bought a share. Nvidia is one of the biggest companies in the S&P 500, so most index funds and target-date funds in retirement accounts hold a lot of it. When Nvidia drops this hard, so does the average 401(k) statement. The next test comes fast: Nvidia reports quarterly earnings on Tuesday, Nov. 17, and Anthropic’s IPO is lined up as another test of how much investors still believe in AI.
The BeezLoop Take
Nvidia’s board did the right thing by not waiting. A CEO who had a relationship with someone U.S. intelligence thinks is a Chinese spy, at a company whose chips are at the center of U.S. export controls, is a national security problem, not just a personal one.
But this also shows how much of the AI boom rested on one man. A $4 trillion company had no chair until Thursday. Investors who treated Huang as Nvidia are finding out what that costs.
The open question: does the Wachtell Lipton investigation find anything that actually reached Nvidia’s technology, or was this a personal scandal that cost the company its founder?
Sources: Nvidia filing (SEC) · CNBC · Scripps News (video)
