Jensen Huang has resigned as Nvidia CEO, president and board member effective immediately. CFO Colette Kress will serve as interim CEO while the board searches for a permanent successor.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has resigned as CEO, president and board member effective immediately, the company announced Thursday following a board meeting on Wednesday. Chief financial officer Colette Kress will take over as interim CEO while the board searches for a permanent successor, considering internal and external candidates.
Huang, who co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and is its fourth-largest investor with a stake of about 3.61 per cent, will not remain on the board. Nvidia’s board met on Wednesday to consider his ouster, a person familiar with the matter said, after reports earlier that day that Huang had an extramarital affair with a senior company executive who reported to him.
Pressure mounted on Huang after reports that the 63-year-old, who is married, had an affair with a Chinese businesswoman whom U.S. authorities suspect of spying for Beijing. The woman, Alice Huang, is a former executive at Singapore-based cloud company Megaspeed and is not related to Jensen Huang. U.S. authorities have concluded she was a Chinese intelligence asset. Beijing has denied Alice Huang is a spy.
Washington has also investigated Megaspeed, a coveted official Nvidia cloud partner with priority access to its chips, over suspicions it helped China obtain advanced AI chips restricted under U.S. export controls, according to media reports.
The New York Times reported that Huang also had an affair with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice-president of health care, who reported to him. Huang admitted he had been “unfaithful” to his wife and apologized to his family and shareholders in a memo to Nvidia employees over the weekend.
Earlier this month, Nvidia’s board launched a probe, led by independent directors with outside legal counsel, into whether Jensen Huang had been targeted by a foreign intelligence operation. It also expressed confidence in him at the time.
Nvidia is a US$4-trillion company. Its investment portfolio is worth about $99 billion and spans AI companies from frontier labs to neoclouds. Huang’s exit plunges the company into uncertainty and threatens to disrupt an AI ecosystem that he helped bankroll by pouring Nvidia’s swelling cash pile back into cloud providers, suppliers and the industry’s biggest labs.
The departure could also have far-reaching consequences for U.S. chip export policy, given Huang’s push to preserve access to the Chinese market and his close ties with U.S. President Donald Trump. Trump said on Sunday that Huang had “done an amazing job for our country” and that the Nvidia chief had told him he had no idea the Chinese woman he had an affair with was a spy.
Sources
This article was drafted with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. Company claims are reported as claims. Cover image is AI-generated.
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