For over three decades, Jensen Huang was Nvidia. He co-founded it, he shaped it, he wore the leather jacket on stage and made GPU keynotes feel like rock concerts. He turned a gaming graphics company into the backbone of the artificial intelligence revolution. At its peak, Nvidia was worth more than $5 trillion — a number so large it still feels fictional. And then, in a matter of days, it all unraveled.
On Thursday, November 12, 2026, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigned amid reports of two affairs — one of which involved a woman suspected of being a Chinese spy. The announcement sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Washington alike. The Nvidia Board of Directors announced that Jensen Huang has resigned as President, Chief Executive Officer, and a member of the Board, effective immediately. There was no farewell tour, no graceful sunset. Just a terse regulatory filing and a stunned industry trying to make sense of what had just happened.
The resignation came days after the company took the extraordinary step of launching an internal investigation following news reports alleging that Huang had had an extramarital affair with one of the company’s clients, who U.S. intelligence officials concluded had been recruited by China’s top spy agency. Nvidia initially maintained Huang would stay on as CEO as the company conducted its investigation. But scrutiny grew late Wednesday after reports emerged that he had a separate affair with a Nvidia executive. Then came a third — allegations of yet another extramarital affair involving a different Nvidia employee. It was simply too much. The board, which had tried to hold the line, had no choice. Even a reported phone call from President Trump urging Huang to fight to keep his job wasn’t enough to change the outcome.
In a statement that managed to be both gracious and devastating, the company’s board said: “Jensen’s contributions to NVIDIA are profound. NVIDIA is one of the most consequential technology companies in the world. The Board and the company thank Jensen for his immeasurable contributions to the company and the industry.” There were no personal words from Huang himself — at least not publicly.
Colette Kress, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of NVIDIA, has been named Interim Chief Executive Officer. A 13-year veteran of the company, Kress has navigated Nvidia’s meteoric rise through the AI era. She is not Jensen Huang — nobody is — but the board clearly felt she was the safest pair of hands available. Harvey C. Jones, former CEO of Synopsys, will become the first-ever chair of the board, a structural change that signals just how much is shifting inside the company. Nvidia executive Ian Buck has also emerged as a frontrunner on prediction markets for the permanent CEO role, as the board begins its search considering both internal and external candidates.
Nvidia shares declined over 4% Thursday after the resignation was announced, pushing the company’s market value below $4 trillion. The drop was relatively contained — a sign that investors are betting on institutional resilience rather than pricing in a collapse. The chips are still in demand. The order books are still full. The CUDA software ecosystem remains deeply entrenched. But Nvidia without Jensen Huang is a genuinely unknown quantity.
Huang wasn’t just a CEO. He was the company’s chief storyteller, its chief evangelist, and arguably the most consequential figure in the AI hardware revolution. The leather jacket, the packed arenas, the midnight product launches — that was him. All of it. He co-founded Nvidia 33 years ago and personally evangelized the technologies that made it indispensable to the modern world. His framing shaped how the entire industry talked about AI and computing demand.
What happens next depends on how well the institution he built can outlast the man who built it. For the first time in 33 years, someone else will have to figure out what comes next.