Nvidia names interim CEO after Jensen Huang resigns

Colette Kress will lead Nvidia while the board searches for a successor, as the chipmaker faces investor shock and pressure over China and AI spending.

Jensen Huang has stepped down as president and chief executive of Nvidia, the company said on Thursday, just days after he admitted to a romantic affair with an alleged Chinese spy. The resignation hits at a delicate moment for the chipmaker, which sits at the heart of the AI boom and now faces fresh questions about leadership and strategy. Nvidia said its board accepted Huang’s resignation on Wednesday. It named chief financial officer and executive vice president Colette Kress as interim CEO while it looks for a permanent replacement.

Kress will continue serving as CFO during the transition.

A sudden leadership change at the center of the AI boom

Huang founded Nvidia in 1993 and had led it ever since. Under him, the company went from a struggling chip designer to one of the most influential names in technology, especially as demand surged for graphics processing units, or GPUs.

Those chips were first best known for handling video graphics on PCs and gaming systems. Over time, they became useful for far broader computing work because they can process many calculations at once. That made them valuable first for crypto mining and later for training and running neural networks, the systems at the core of modern AI models.

Nvidia’s rise was not immediate. The company went through early struggles and layoffs before its GPU design became the industry standard. It later expanded beyond gaming, especially after launching the CUDA architecture in 2006, which let developers use Nvidia chips for other kinds of work, including research and general-purpose computing.

How Nvidia became a pillar of AI infrastructure

The company’s importance grew sharply once AI researchers started using its GPUs to train neural networks more than a decade ago. Huang then pushed Nvidia deeper into AI and data centers, helping turn it into the dominant supplier for much of the AI industry.

That position brought huge financial gains. Before ChatGPT set off the current AI boom, Nvidia shares traded at about $15. By last month, they had climbed more than 1,450% to an all-time high of $243. The company’s market value has increased by $5.5 trillion since then, reaching as high as $5.88 trillion in early October.

Revenue climbed just as dramatically. Nvidia reported $96.22 billion in revenue in its second quarter, up from $5.93 billion in Q3 2023. Profit rose to $59.69 billion as of July 2026, compared with $680 million in October 2023.

Huang also became one of the company’s most visible public advocates — and a prominent voice on AI more broadly. He traveled to conferences and events around the world, lobbied for looser regulation after U.S. export controls were placed on high-power AI chips sold to China, and cultivated a close relationship with Donald Trump, often to Nvidia’s benefit.

Market reaction and questions about what comes next

Investors reacted quickly. Nvidia shares were down nearly 12% in early Thursday trading. Since Friday, the stock has fallen as much as 19%, wiping out more than $855 billion in market value.

The timing matters because Nvidia remains deeply tied to the AI and data center buildout it helped accelerate. According to IT-PUB News, the company has used its financial strength to support customers and partners that buy its chips, while also backing the infrastructure needed to keep that market expanding.

At the end of its second quarter, Nvidia reported $99 billion in investments and another $25 billion in commitments. It also had $36 billion in cloud service commitments. Those arrangements help AI cloud operators finance the GPUs and data center equipment they buy from Nvidia, while giving the chipmaker a chance to buy compute from them and potentially share in their revenue.

Nvidia has also invested directly in neocloud companies. In January, it put $2 billion into CoreWeave, and another $2 billion into Nebius in March. It was also said to be considering acting as guarantor for Nscale’s planned West Virginia data center project. Separately, it has signed up to provide up to $105 billion in credit guarantees for an OpenAI data center campus in Ohio.

China, debt concerns, and a more uncertain future

The resignation also comes as Nvidia’s China business is under pressure. China has long been an important market for the company, but its role has shrunk in recent years because of strict U.S. export controls and Beijing’s push for domestic alternatives. Chinese customers accounted for about $7.9 billion in revenue in Nvidia’s second quarter, or roughly 8% of total revenue.

Investors were already uneasy about the large amounts of debt being raised across the AI infrastructure sector. Huang’s departure adds another layer of uncertainty, especially because Nvidia has been one of the main forces financing that buildout.

The company has also invested heavily in the AI labs building models that run on its chips. It has put $30 billion into OpenAI and $10 billion into Anthropic. It has backed Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab as part of a deal involving at least 1 GW of its Vera Rubin GPU systems. Nvidia has also invested $3.5 billion in MediaTek to help the Taiwanese company develop custom AI chips that work with Nvidia’s systems.

The market reaction has already spread beyond Nvidia itself. CoreWeave shares fell about 9% on Thursday, after a 25% rally on Wednesday. Nebius was down about 16%, and IREN fell 6.6%.

Board changes and the search for a permanent successor

Nvidia’s board also appointed Harvey C. Jones, managing partner of Square Wave Ventures and former CEO of Synopsys, as the company’s first chair of the board of directors. Jones has served on Nvidia’s board since 1993 and is expected to play a central role in the search for a permanent CEO.

Huang remains Nvidia’s largest individual shareholder, but he owns only about 3.5% of the company’s stock. Unlike some Silicon Valley founders, he did not have supervoting rights, and the board could vote him out at any time.

That makes the transition especially striking. Huang ran Nvidia with a very flat structure, had about 60 direct reports, and left no clear heir apparent or succession plan. Even though two of his children worked in executive roles at the company, Nvidia now has to manage a change at the top without the founder who shaped its rise.

The industry will get its first look at that next phase next week, when Nvidia reports earnings on Tuesday.