Nvidia's board spent Sunday defending Jensen Huang. On Thursday, it accepted his resignation.
The founder who turned a graphics-chip startup into the roughly $4 trillion center of the artificial intelligence boom is out after 33 years as chief executive, USA Today reported. Chief financial officer Colette Kress will serve as interim CEO while the board searches for a permanent successor, and Harvey Jones was named Nvidia's first-ever board chair. "The Board and the company thank Jensen for his immeasurable contributions to the company and the industry," the company said in its announcement.
The speed of the reversal is the story. On Sunday, the board said it had "no reason to believe" national security interests or Nvidia secrets had been compromised and expressed confidence in Huang. By Wednesday night, directors were meeting to decide whether to oust him, Reuters reported, and the Wall Street Journal reported they were preparing to remove him. What changed in between was a second allegation: on Tuesday, the New York Times reported that Huang also had an extramarital relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice president of healthcare, citing five people who worked at the company.
Huang admitted on Sunday to an extramarital affair, without naming the other party, and apologized to his family and colleagues. The other relationship at the center of the board's investigation involves Alice Huang, a Singapore-based tech executive whom U.S. intelligence officials suspect of spying for China. U.S. authorities have concluded that Megaspeed, the Singapore firm where she worked and an Nvidia customer, is a Chinese intelligence asset, and the allegations involve her facilitating shipments of Nvidia chips to Chinese firms. The FBI is investigating, and Huang faces a potential congressional subpoena if he does not agree to a closed-door briefing.
Investors have already rendered their verdict. Nvidia shares fell more than 10% in pre-market trading on Thursday, CNN reported, and the company has shed roughly $600 billion in market value this week since the board announced its investigation. President Donald Trump, who said on Monday that he was "amazed" by the allegations and expected Huang would be "in good shape," is not intervening, according to the Washington Post.
The vacuum this leaves is unlike any other CEO exit in tech. Huang cofounded Nvidia in 1993 and, by his own telling, built the company so that he knew how to run it. He owns about 3.6% of its stock and has no obvious successor. Kress, Nvidia's CFO for more than a decade, is the most visible executive after Huang — but she inherits a company under an FBI investigation, a board probe run by Wachtell Lipton, a House deadline, and a shareholder suit, all while rivals from Google to Anthropic are arguing the CUDA moat can finally be cracked.
Nvidia reports earnings on November 17. That call was already going to be the most scrutinized of the AI era. Now it will be the first one without the man who made the company.
— via USA Today