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Jensen Huang Resigns. Nvidia’s Founder Era Ends with Questions Still Open.

Colette Kress takes over as interim CEO as the AI chipmaker confronts a leadership transition, an independent investigation, and scrutiny of its business with China.

• By John K. Waters
• 11/12/2026

For 33 years, Nvidia’s future had a familiar spokesman: Jensen Huang. On Thursday, November 12, the company announced that the founder who had steered it from computer graphics into the infrastructure of artificial intelligence was leaving immediately.

Huang resigned as president, chief executive, and board member, according to Nvidia’s transition announcement. Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress will run the company on an interim basis while retaining her finance responsibilities. The board is starting a search that will include candidates from inside and outside Nvidia.

The resignation settles who is running the company today. It leaves the investigation that preceded the departure, and the question of Nvidia’s longer-term leadership, unresolved.

Four Days from Confidence to Departure
On November 8, Nvidia’s directors announced an independent investigation into reporting that Huang had been targeted by a foreign intelligence effort. A committee of independent directors, with help from outside counsel, would oversee the review.

The board said then that it had no reason to believe national security or Nvidia secrets had been compromised. It also expressed confidence in Huang and his leadership team. Those were the board’s stated positions at the start of an inquiry, rather than published findings from a completed investigation.

Huang separately acknowledged infidelity in a message to employees that day. “I was unfaithful to my wife,” he wrote, apologizing to his family and saying he would cooperate with the investigation. The message did not establish the intelligence allegations.

On November 11, another report added a workplace-governance dimension. Reuters, citing The New York Times, reported an alleged affair with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of health care, who reported to Huang. The Times cited five people who had worked at the company. The Reuters account remains attributed reporting, rather than an admission in Huang’s published message.

Reuters reported that the board met late Wednesday to decide Huang’s future. Thursday’s announcement described his exit as a resignation; it did not publish findings resolving the allegations.

The Security Questions Outlast the CEO
The controversy involving Alice Huang, a former executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed International, reaches beyond the personal conduct of a chief executive. U.S. authorities suspect her of acting for Chinese intelligence, according to The Associated Press. China has denied attempting to ensnare Jensen Huang. AP reported that President Donald Trump said Monday that the FBI was investigating.

The distinction matters: an acknowledged affair does not, by itself, prove espionage, an export-control violation, or the transfer of confidential information.

In a November 11 letter, Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chris Coons asked administration officials to preserve records concerning advanced AI chip exports, possible diversion, and the suspected intelligence operation. Their request covered licensing decisions and interagency deliberations, among other material. The letter represents an oversight demand, not an adjudication of its underlying allegations.

Megaspeed also issued a response, in which Chairman and CEO James Tan Yong Pong said the company had cooperated with U.S. Commerce Department inspections and was prepared to cooperate with other relevant U.S. authorities. Megaspeed said it had hired a U.S. law firm to inventory its chips and verify its export controls, according to reports.

Changing Nvidia’s leadership does not answer what information, if any, was compromised or whether existing controls were adequate. Those are questions for the investigations and the evidence they produce.

The Engineer Who Made a Graphics Company Central to AI
Huang’s departure closes a tenure that began well before generative AI became an enterprise budget item. Born in Taiwan, he earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering at Stanford in 1992 after studying at Oregon State. He worked at AMD and LSI Logic before founding Nvidia.

Huang co-founded Nvidia with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem on April 5, 1993. The early ambition was 3D graphics for gaming and multimedia. Nvidia’s corporate history marks the introduction of CUDA in 2006 as a step opening GPU parallel processing to science and research, followed by the use of its hardware in the breakthrough AlexNet neural network in 2012.

That progression helps explain the succession challenge. Nvidia’s role in AI grew from a long sequence of engineering and platform decisions. Replacing its most visible executive is also a test of whether the organization can sustain that direction through a different leadership structure.

Continuity Now, Strategy Next
Kress has been Nvidia’s CFO since September 2013, following finance roles at Cisco and Microsoft, according to her company biography. The board also appointed Harvey C. Jones, a former Synopsys chief executive and executive chairman, as Nvidia’s first-ever board chair.

Jones said the board expects the company’s “operations, customer commitments and product roadmap to continue without interruption.” That is a forward-looking assurance from the board, rather than an independently demonstrated outcome of the transition.

Investors reacted sharply. AP reported that Nvidia shares fell 14% at Thursday’s opening bell. That is an opening-market snapshot, not a closing price.

Analysts interviewed by Reuters before the resignation drew a distinction between near-term demand and longer-term direction. Shay Boloor, chief market strategist at Futurum Equities, said he did not expect the next 12 to 18 months of revenue to disappear if Huang left. His concern centered on the following decade and Huang’s ability to anticipate changes in computing.

Anna Wu, founder of Floodlines Research, emphasized the underlying demand for Nvidia’s processors. “The AI trade rests on that demand, not on one individual,” she told Reuters. The same report examined concerns that a leadership change could affect Nvidia’s willingness to finance the wider AI ecosystem.

For enterprise customers, those are distinct issues. A change in leadership is not evidence of an immediate supply disruption. Longer-term questions concern the priorities a permanent CEO will set and whether Nvidia’s investment approach changes. Customers will need to compare the board’s continuity assurances with subsequent commitments and execution.

The next scheduled checkpoint is November 17, when Nvidia reports its fiscal 2027 third-quarter results. A company long identified with its founder will have to explain its outlook under interim leadership, while the questions that helped precipitate his departure remain open.