Jensen Huang resigns as Nvidia CEO: Colette Kress takes over, and the AI industry loses its backstop of last resort

Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia’s president, chief executive and board member on November 12, effective immediately, according to the company’s SEC filing. Chief financial officer Colette Kress will serve as interim CEO while keeping the CFO role until a permanent successor is named, and longtime director Harvey C. Jones becomes Nvidia’s first-ever board chair. The board will consider internal and external candidates and gave no timeline.

Four days earlier, the board had opened an independent investigation after reports that Huang was the target of a Chinese intelligence effort, which we covered in our report on the board probe and Megaspeed. At that point Nvidia said Huang would keep leading “without interruption.” The reversal took less than a week, and it removes the founder of the company that supplies most of the world’s AI compute, and that has quietly underwritten much of the financing behind it.

How it went from probe to resignation

Nvidia’s release gives no reason for the departure and does not quote Huang. The public record comes from reporting. Huang admitted in a November 8 email to staff that he had been unfaithful to his wife; the relationship reported at the time was with Alice Huang (no relation), an executive linked to Nvidia customer Megaspeed whom US intelligence reportedly believes is a Chinese spy. The US government has not presented public evidence of espionage, and Huang has denied compromising national security or company secrets.

Per CNBC’s live coverage, the New York Times reported late on November 11 a second affair, with a senior Nvidia executive, and Reuters then reported an intimate relationship with another, unnamed employee. A source told CNBC that the board’s sentiment turned after the second report and that it decided to remove Huang the night before the announcement. The Times reported that President Trump had called Huang that week urging him to fight to keep his job.

The investigation, run with outside counsel Wachtell Lipton, continues. So does the export-control thread: Semafor reported that the Justice Department is examining whether groups linked to Alice Huang diverted Super Micro AI servers to China, and Super Micro shares fell 12% on the report.

The governance change is larger than one person

Huang co-founded Nvidia 33 years ago and ran it with unusual concentration of authority, including roughly 60 direct reports. The board has now separated the chair and CEO roles for the first time. Jones, who joined the board in 1993 and was formerly CEO and executive chairman of chip-design company Synopsys, chairs it. Kress joined Nvidia in September 2013 after senior finance roles at Microsoft, Cisco and Texas Instruments.

Analysts quoted by CNBC listed Kress, Ian Buck, Bryan Catanzaro, Michael Kagan and chief scientist Bill Dally as plausible internal candidates. Wedbush’s Dan Ives said he expects Kress to hold the interim role for about a year and a permanent outsider to follow. Yale’s Jeffrey Sonnenfeld described Huang as a “monarch” and argued the board was poorly equipped to step in, which is the core risk in a succession nobody planned: the people choosing the next CEO have rarely had to overrule the last one.

Shares opened down more than 13%, briefly dropping Nvidia below a $4 trillion market value, then recovered to close down 4.3% on the day. CNBC put Nvidia’s losses since the previous Friday at more than $740 billion. Several analysts cut price targets: Baird from $500 to $200 with a downgrade to neutral, Stifel from $315 to $205, and Cantor from $350 to $250. AMD rose about 3% on the day and nearly 17% for the week, while neocloud stocks that depend on Nvidia supply and financing fell harder than Nvidia itself: CoreWeave about 12%, Nebius 17%, IREN 8%.

Why AI builders should care: the Nvidia put

That neocloud sell-off points to the issue with consequences beyond Nvidia’s share price. Over the past two years Nvidia has become a financier as well as a supplier. Semafor calls Huang “the AI world’s central bank chairman,” and the numbers back the description: according to Semafor, Nvidia guarantees more than $100 billion in data-center leases per its SEC filings, and holds $51 billion in private company stock and $63 billion in public company stock. CNBC lists investments of at least $30 billion in OpenAI, $5 billion in Intel and about $2 billion each in CoreWeave, Nebius, Marvell, Lumentum and Coherent, plus a reported $10 billion purchase of Anthropic stock planned for right after its IPO.

That willingness to be a guaranteed buyer, the “Nvidia put,” has lowered the cost of capital for AI labs, neoclouds and data-center developers, because lenders and investors priced in Nvidia standing behind demand. Semafor’s argument is that a successor with a board watching more closely is less likely to sign off-balance-sheet guarantees on a founder’s conviction, which would raise the cost of AI debt and equity and slow some construction. CNBC cites one infrastructure financier saying a letter of intent from Nvidia “is usually not good enough” for lenders anymore. Nvidia’s chair said operations, customer commitments and the product roadmap continue “without interruption,” so existing contracts stand; the open question is how many new ones the company writes.

Open-source AI has a specific stake. Nvidia agreed in September to buy Hugging Face for about $12.9 billion, its second-largest deal after the $20 billion Groq asset purchase, and the Justice Department is reviewing its competitive effect. TechCrunch reports the deal is still scheduled to close in the first half of 2027. Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue called it a “really sad day” and pledged to keep fighting for open-source AI “harder than ever.” Huang was the executive who championed open weights at Nvidia, from the July policy letter urging Washington not to over-restrict open models to the Nemotron model family; whether that remains a priority under new leadership is not yet stated.

The China and policy fallout

Washington’s response has hardened since the probe opened. House Foreign Affairs chair Brian Mast said Huang “has agreed to come” to testify, likely under oath, with the date still being negotiated, and that he would subpoena Huang if needed. Senate Banking chair Tim Scott requested testimony from Huang on December 3 and from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on December 10. Democrats Ron Wyden and Richard Neal opened an inquiry into the H200 export approvals granted to Chinese government-linked firms. Trump, meanwhile, posted that Apple’s Tim Cook should replace Huang.

Huang had been the industry’s loudest advocate for selling more chips into China. With him gone and the Megaspeed questions now part of a Justice Department matter, the political room for loosening export rules has narrowed. CNBC reports Chinese chip traffickers have been told to pause, and that eight banned B300 GPUs fetch about 20 million yuan (roughly $2.99 million) on the black market against an official US price of $550,000. Alibaba shares fell about 7% in Hong Kong on reports it was a Megaspeed customer.

What to watch

• November 17 earnings. Nvidia reports fiscal third-quarter results on schedule. The call will be Kress’s first as interim CEO, and the test is whether management reaffirms guidance and says anything about Southeast Asian sales or new financing commitments.
• New guarantees and investments. Whether Nvidia keeps signing lease backstops and equity deals at the old pace will matter more for neoclouds and AI labs than who wins the CEO search.
• The Anthropic IPO. Anthropic is pricing its listing at $70 to $78 a share; whether Nvidia’s reported $10 billion order goes ahead unchanged is a clean early signal.
• Testimony dates. December 3 in the Senate, plus a House date still being set, where Huang would answer questions under oath about Megaspeed and chip diversion.
• The investigation’s findings. None of the public reporting so far shows that a secret or a restricted chip moved because of these relationships. If the board publishes its conclusions, that is the record that will matter.