Jensen Huang resigns after 33 years; CFO Colette Kress named interim CEO and Harvey Jones becomes the first board chair as shares fall as much as 13%
Nvidia co-founder Jensen Huang resigned as CEO and director on Nov. 12. CFO Colette Kress is interim CEO and Harvey Jones the first board chair. Huang had admitted a relationship with an executive U.S. officials suspect of spying for China. Shares fell as much as 13%.
Jensen Huang, who co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and ran it for 33 years, resigned on Thursday as president, chief executive and a member of the board, effective immediately.
Nvidia's board named Colette Kress, executive vice president and chief financial officer, as interim CEO in a release filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. She will keep the CFO role until a permanent successor is chosen, and the board said it will consider internal and external candidates. Harvey C. Jones, a director since 1993, becomes the company's first-ever board chair.
The release gave no reason for the resignation and did not quote Huang. It followed two weeks of reporting by The New York Times that U.S. intelligence had concluded a businesswoman close to Huang was passing information to Beijing, and Huang's admission in a Nov. 8 memo to staff that he had been unfaithful to his wife.
"I am committed to building on the extraordinary foundation Jensen created over the last 33 years," Kress said, adding that the company's focus "remains on serving our customers, partners, developers and shareholders." Jones said the board "has full confidence in Colette and the leadership team" and expects operations, customer commitments and the product roadmap "to continue without interruption."
Two weeks from the first report to the resignation
The Times reported on Oct. 29 that U.S. intelligence agencies had concluded that Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, an executive at Singapore data-center company Megaspeed, had been recruited by China's Ministry of State Security. She is not related to Jensen Huang. Megaspeed bought more than $4.8 billion of Nvidia chips over the past two years. Nvidia said at the time that meeting customer executives is part of a CEO's job, and China's foreign ministry called the report "groundless speculation."
"I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children," Huang wrote to employees on Nov. 8. The same day the board opened an independent investigation into reports that he had been the target of a foreign intelligence effort, while saying he would stay on as CEO. President Donald Trump confirmed on Nov. 9 that the FBI was also looking into the relationship and said Huang told him he had no idea of the woman's alleged ties.
On Nov. 11 the Times reported that Huang had also had a relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice president of health care, who reported to him. Nvidia's code of conduct flags personal relationships as a potential conflict with an employee's obligations to the company. The Wall Street Journal reported the same day that the board was weighing whether to remove him. The board announced the resignation the next morning.
Shares drop as much as 13%; third-quarter results due Nov. 17
Nvidia shares fell more than 13% in the first minutes of trading before paring losses. At 10:51 a.m. Eastern they were down 5.0% at $165.05, according to Yahoo Finance.
Kress's first scheduled test is the fiscal 2027 third-quarter report on Nov. 17, with results due around 1:20 p.m. Pacific and a call at 2 p.m. Three House committees, including Foreign Affairs, had asked Huang earlier this month to attend a closed-door briefing on Nov. 18, and CNBC reported that he has agreed to testify before Congress following his resignation.
260,000 GPUs promised to Korea; no specific answer on the schedule
Nvidia's largest commitments to South Korea were announced by Huang himself. During the APEC summit in Gyeongju on Oct. 31, 2025, he pledged 260,000 Blackwell GPUs (블랙웰 GPU 26만 장) — 50,000 each to the Korean government, Samsung, SK Group and Hyundai Motor Group, and 60,000 to Naver Cloud. Deputy Prime Minister and Science Minister Bae Kyung-hoon (배경훈) said in June that Korea would receive priority supply of the next-generation Vera Rubin platform.
Korean outlet BizWatch (비즈워치) reported on Nov. 10 that Nvidia gave no specific answer when asked whether the affair could affect the GPU delivery schedule or high-bandwidth memory cooperation with Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. Lee Do-gyu (이도규), head of the science ministry's ICT policy office, said "business is business" and that cooperation with Nvidia would continue. Huang's daughter Madison Huang canceled a trip to Korea for family reasons, and a planned meeting with Bae did not take place.
Universal Music, ElevenLabs, Disney: entertainment AI deals Huang fronted himself
On Jan. 6 Nvidia announced a strategic partnership with Universal Music Group, the world's largest music company. UMG's catalogue of more than 3 million recordings will be used to extend Music Flamingo, Nvidia's music-understanding model, and the two companies will run creative labs with artists and songwriters. Music Flamingo analyzes the harmony, structure, timbre and lyrics of tracks up to 15 minutes long.
Voice AI company ElevenLabs is an Nvidia portfolio company; the investment was unveiled in a video conversation between Huang and co-founder Mati Staniszewski. ElevenLabs raised $550 million in a Series D this year at an $11 billion valuation and is growing its dubbing, localization and voice-agent businesses. Variety reported that on Nov. 11, the day before Huang resigned, Nvidia expanded the partnership so that ElevenLabs will offer governments voice agents built on Nvidia's AI architecture. Nvidia is also developing Newton, an open-source physics engine for robot learning, with Disney and Google DeepMind, and has invested in AI video companies Runway and Higgsfield.
Axios listed what happens to the companies that depend on Huang as one of five questions the scandal poses for the AI industry. The board's Nov. 12 release said customer commitments and the product roadmap would continue, but did not address individual investments or partnerships.
Krafton's PUBG Ally, Wemade Next's MIR5: Korean game partnerships ran through Huang too
Gaming is where Nvidia began. On Oct. 30, 2025, Huang shared the stage with Samsung Electronics chairman Lee Jae-yong (이재용) and Hyundai Motor Group chairman Chung Eui-sun (정의선) at GeForce's 25th-anniversary event at COEX in Seoul. On June 7 this year he met Krafton chairman Chang Byung-gyu (장병규) at a Seoul PC bang to discuss games and physical AI.
In June Krafton laid out plans to beta-test PUBG Ally, a co-playable character built on an on-device small language model using Nvidia ACE, in PUBG: Battlegrounds Arcade. Korean outlet Dealsite (딜사이트) reported that Krafton plans to spend more than 100 billion won (about $75 million) by next year on a GPU cluster based on Nvidia's B300. Wemade Next's MIR5 also uses ACE for an AI boss character.
Successor, earnings, Congress: the week ahead
The board gave no timetable for naming a permanent CEO. Trump suggested on Truth Social on Nov. 12 that Tim Cook, who stepped down as Apple's CEO in September and is now its executive chair, should take the job, writing "A Legend replaces a Legend!"
The coming week brings the Nov. 17 earnings report and the Nov. 18 congressional briefing, while the board's independent review and the FBI inquiry continue. For the Korean government and companies, the open question is whether the 260,000-GPU supply and HBM cooperation proceed unchanged under new leadership; in entertainment and games, it is how partnerships Huang announced or negotiated in person, such as those with UMG, ElevenLabs and Krafton, proceed under new management. The board has said operations, customer commitments and the product roadmap will continue without interruption.
Feature photo: Nvidia's Santa Clara, California, campus. Photo: Coolcaesar / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)