Jensen Huang officially resigns as NVIDIA CEO and director: 33-year tenure ends, stock plunges 13% at market open

Beating AI News Flash, November 12 - Nvidia officially announced that co-founder Jensen Huang has immediately resigned from his roles as President, CEO, and Board member, ending his 33-year tenure at the helm.

Current CFO Colette Kress has been appointed Interim CEO while retaining her role as head of finance. The Board has initiated a formal search for a successor, considering both internal and external candidates.

Nvidia also established the position of Chairman of the Board for the first time, appointing veteran director Harvey C. Jones. He joined the Board at the company's founding in 1993 and previously served as CEO of chip design software giant Synopsys.

Kress, 58, joined Nvidia in 2013 and has served as CFO for over 13 years. She previously worked at Microsoft for 13 years and later managed finance operations at Cisco. She has long overseen Nvidia's financial strategy, capital allocation, and investor relations, participating in the company's entire evolution from a gaming graphics card manufacturer to an AI chip giant.

This leadership change comes just four days after Nvidia's Board publicly expressed confidence in Jensen Huang.

On November 8, Huang admitted to marital infidelity, and the Board announced the launch of an independent investigation while still expressing support for him to continue leading the company. On November 11, a second extramarital relationship allegedly involving a direct subordinate at the company was exposed, prompting the Board to discuss removing him and begin searching for a successor.

Nvidia's official resignation announcement did not specify the reasons for Huang's departure nor disclose the final conclusions of the independent investigation. The announcement made no mention of arranging advisory or other transitional roles for him. Huang still holds approximately 3.6% of the company's shares.

Market reaction was severe. Following the resignation announcement, Nvidia's pre-market decline widened to over 10%. At 22:31 Beijing time when U.S. markets opened, the stock fell as much as 13.39%. Nvidia-backed AI cloud service provider CoreWeave opened down 16.42%, and Nebius fell 21.15%.

Huang's departure will not immediately change Nvidia's existing GPU supply and CUDA software ecosystem, but the company's next-generation product roadmap, capacity planning, and the large-scale AI infrastructure investments he personally championed all require the new leadership team to take over.

Kress is familiar with Nvidia's financial, customer, and operational systems, but lacks Huang's long-accumulated technical strategy and industry influence. The Board's choice to have her temporarily at the helm is primarily to maintain existing business operations. What truly determines Nvidia's next phase direction remains the permanent CEO selection.

NVIDIA stated that customer deliveries, product roadmap, and company operations will proceed as usual, and the quarterly earnings conference call scheduled for November 17 will not be postponed. This will be the first quarterly earnings release since NVIDIA's founding without Jensen Huang serving as CEO.