Jensen Huang has stepped down as chief executive officer of Nvidia, marking a significant turning point for the company and the broader artificial intelligence sector. The resignation leaves the industry without its most prominent figure and introduces uncertainty regarding the future of the chipmaker that Huang helped transform into an AI leader. In a statement released on Thursday, the company announced that Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress will assume the role of interim CEO while a search for a permanent successor begins.
Alongside the leadership change, Nvidia appointed Harvey Jones, the former CEO of Synopsys and a current board member, as its first-ever board chairman. Huang, who co-founded the company, will also exit the board. He remains the fourth-largest investor in Nvidia with a stake of approximately 3.61 percent. The news sent a shockwave through financial markets, with Nvidia shares dropping more than 10 percent in premarket trading, which in turn weighed on the broader market.
The decision to remove Huang from the top spot followed intense pressure in recent days. Reports emerged that the 63-year-old, who is married, had an affair with a Chinese businesswoman whom US authorities suspect of spying for Beijing. The situation became more complicated when it was reported earlier on Wednesday that Huang also had an extramarital relationship with a senior company executive who reported directly to him. A person familiar with the matter stated that Nvidia’s board met on Wednesday to consider his ouster following these reports.
Michael Feldman, a portfolio manager at ClearBridge Investments, noted that the primary risk is not the company's visible technology roadmap, which is stable for the next several years, but rather its execution. He described Huang as the chief conductor of an extraordinarily complex system, arguing that in a world facing real bottlenecks, that level of coordination serves as a competitive advantage in itself.
Huang’s departure plunges the $4 trillion company into a period of uncertainty. This threatens to disrupt an AI ecosystem that he helped bankroll by reinvesting Nvidia’s growing cash reserves into cloud providers, suppliers, and major industry labs. Investor sentiment toward AI stocks had already been shaky due to soaring cash burn and rising debt at traditionally cash-rich tech giants, fueling doubts about whether the AI boom will ultimately deliver returns.
The exit may also have significant implications for US chip export policy. Huang had been a vocal advocate for preserving Nvidia's access to the Chinese market and maintained close ties with US President Donald Trump. On Sunday, Trump commented that Huang had done an amazing job for the country and noted that the Nvidia chief had told him he did not know the Chinese woman he was involved with was a spy.
For years, Nvidia was primarily recognized by gamers for its high-performance graphics cards. However, the ability of its chips to perform many calculations simultaneously has made them a strategic prize in the US-China race to dominate AI technology, cementing Nvidia's position as the world’s most valuable company. This status turned Huang into a rock-star CEO, often mobbed by fans in places like Taiwan and South Korea who ask for his signature on books, posters, and even their bodies. His influence was so strong that stock prices would move at the mere mention of certain company names at his events.
Scrutiny of Huang’s personal conduct intensified after reports of his relationship with Alice Huang, a former executive at Singapore-based cloud company Megaspeed. US authorities have concluded that Alice Huang was a Chinese intelligence asset, although Beijing has denied this claim. The two, who have been photographed together in Taiwan, Singapore, and California, are not related. Washington has also investigated Megaspeed, a valued Nvidia cloud partner with priority access to chips, over suspicions that it helped China obtain advanced AI chips restricted under US export controls.
Earlier this month, Nvidia’s board launched a probe led by independent directors and outside legal counsel to determine if Jensen Huang had been targeted by a foreign intelligence operation. At that time, the board expressed confidence in his leadership. The controversy escalated on Wednesday when The New York Times reported the affair with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of healthcare, who reported to Huang.
