Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigned Thursday amid reports of two affairs that included a woman suspected of being a Chinese spy, a stunning downfall for one of the world’s most powerful executives.
“Jensen’s contributions to NVIDIA are profound. NVIDIA is one of the most consequential technology companies in the world,” the company’s board said in a statement. “The Board and the company thank Jensen for his immeasurable contributions to the company and the industry.”
The board met Wednesday to assess his future, and the company’s stock price was down at least 9 percent in early trading Thursday.
Colette Kress, current chief financial officer of Nvidia, will serve as interim CEO. She has been with the company since 2013.
The chipmaker now faces the unenviable task of filling the hole left by Huang, who is synonymous with Nvidia. The board said in its Thursday statement that it was initiating a search for a permanent CEO and would look at internal and external candidates.
Huang built Nvidia from a developer of graphics cards used in video game computers to controlling the precious chips used to develop artificial intelligence. The company is one of the heavyweights in a stock market heavily reliant on AI, and he enjoys a close relationship with President Donald Trump, who sought to defend Huang as late as Monday.
Up until Thursday, Nvidia’s board had no official chair, an unusual arrangement compared with peer companies that signaled Huang’s dominance there. Now, the board has appointed its first ever chair, Harvey C. Jones, a venture capitalist who joined in 1993, the year of the company’s founding.
Prior to his resignation, Huang was Nvidia’s largest shareholder, owning about 3.6 percent of the company — enough to make him one of the wealthiest people in the world but a small percentage relative to other tech titans.
Nvidia is set to report earnings Tuesday.
Clad in his signature leather jacket, Huang is an evangelist for the AI boom and garnered the crowd attention of a pop star on recent visits to Seoul and his birthplace of Taiwan.
Nvidia’s board said Sunday that it was investigating Huang’s conduct after he said in a note to the company that he had an affair with a onetime executive at a Singapore-based company who has been accused of being a Chinese spy.
Even then, many analysts had doubted that Huang, who tightly controlled Nvidia over the 33 years since its founding, could lose his perch at the company.
But the tide appeared to turn against Huang Wednesday night after the New York Times reported that, in addition to his affair with the Chinese executive, he also had an intimate relationship with a Nvidia executive who reported to him.
Huang has been a close ally of Trump since his election last year. But as of Wednesday night, the White House was not intervening in the board’s decision, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.
Nvidia is crucial to propping up the stock market, with the Trump administration embracing the AI boom as driving the next chapter of the American economy.
Nvidia has retained the law firm of former federal prosecutor Joon Kim, who investigated allegations of sexual harassment against New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in 2021, to conduct its investigation of Huang.
In Washington, questions have circulated about when the Trump administration knew about Huang’s relationship with the suspected Chinese spy and whether it acted on those warnings. Trump denied to reporters that he was aware of the situation during a May trip to China, where Huang flew on Air Force One. The Post and other news organizations have reported that Trump was in fact briefed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio shortly before Huang joined the presidential plane.
Late Wednesday, Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Massachusetts) and Chris Coons (Delaware) sent a letter to Rubio, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller demanding that they preserve documents related to Nvidia.
Still, in Silicon Valley, Huang has enjoyed a drumbeat of support from investors and other tech figures.
“Seems ill advised for Nvidia’s board to oust Jensen Huang given how central his leadership is to the operations of an engine of our future abundance,” Garry Tan, the CEO of the influential start-up incubator Y Combinator, wrote on X about an hour after reports of Huang’s second affair. “His day to day is prime actor work. Would be hard to believe a transition happens without massive market cap implosion.”
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