Jensen Huang Resigns, Leaving Nvidia to Prove It Can Outlast Him

Nvidia’s founder resigned after 33 years amid a board inquiry, handing interim command to CFO Colette Kress days before results and leaving investors to price the company without him.

Key Takeaways

• Huang resigned as president, CEO and director effective immediately on November 12. CFO Colette Kress becomes interim CEO, and Harvey C. Jones becomes Nvidia’s first-ever board chair.
• The shares fell as much as 10% before the opening bell to about $156, extending a slide that has removed roughly $2 trillion in market value since the October 6 record close of $239.24.
• The business remains strong, with fiscal second-quarter revenue up 106% to $96.2 billion and $108 billion guided for the third quarter, but leadership now carries the valuation debate.

A Resignation Without a Script

Jensen Huang’s 33 years at the head of Nvidia ended on Thursday morning in a statement that ran barely a page. The board said Huang had resigned as president, chief executive and a member of the board, effective immediately. Colette Kress, chief financial officer since 2013, will serve as interim CEO while keeping the finance role. The board will consider internal and external candidates for the permanent post. Harvey C. Jones, a director since 1993 and a former chief executive and executive chairman of Synopsys, becomes the company’s first-ever chair. The release gave no reason for the departure and no update on the board’s independent investigation, which remains open.

The governance change matters as much as the change in personnel. Huang ran Nvidia through an unusually flat structure, with roughly 60 executives reporting directly to him. He also long dismissed formal succession planning, preferring to pass knowledge continuously to his lieutenants. The company’s own annual report warns that Nvidia is “highly dependent on the services of our longstanding executive team.” The board has now split the chair from the chief executive and given it to a director who joined in the founding year. In doing so it has taken direct custody of an enterprise it had largely entrusted to one man. The question it now puts to investors is whether Nvidia’s advantages in software, rack-scale systems and supply chain belong to the institution or to its founder.

Four Days From Confidence to Exit

The speed of the reversal shows how much changed in a week. In late October, The New York Times reported that U.S. intelligence believed an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based cloud customer, had cultivated a close relationship with Huang. Nvidia called his customer contacts routine. On November 4, the Republican chairs of the House Foreign Affairs, China and Intelligence committees asked him to attend a closed-door briefing on November 18. Four days later the board opened an inquiry led by independent directors with outside counsel. It said it had no reason to believe national security or company secrets had been compromised and declared its confidence in Huang. The same day, he told employees he had been unfaithful to his wife.

That confidence lasted until Wednesday. The Times reported a second relationship, with a vice president who reported directly to Huang, and The Wall Street Journal reported that the board was preparing to remove him. A relationship with a subordinate is a governance failure on its own terms, whatever becomes of the security questions. McDonald’s dismissed Steve Easterbrook in 2019 over a consensual relationship with an employee. The espionage allegations remain unproven. Beijing has denied them, neither the Megaspeed executive nor her company has been charged, and the board has published no findings. Washington moved anyway. President Trump called Huang “an honorable guy,” while lawmakers raised the prospect of subpoenas and pressed for tighter limits on Nvidia’s sales to China.

A Market That Had Already Begun to Doubt

The resignation landed on a stock already in retreat. Nvidia closed at a record $239.24 on October 6 and then lost altitude. Rising memory costs, a guided dip in gross margin and the midterm elections all cooled the trade; investors read the election results as a sign of tougher scrutiny for AI infrastructure. On November 5 the shares fell 9.3 percent to $181.60, and Apple overtook Nvidia as the world’s most valuable company. The scandal compounded the damage. The stock fell more than 4 percent on Monday and another 5.5 percent on Tuesday, to $168.89. It recovered modestly on Wednesday, then slid 8.6 percent after hours once the Journal’s report appeared.

On Thursday the stock fell as much as 10 percent before the opening bell, touching about $156, its lowest level since mid-2025. Most of that decline came overnight, before the board had spoken. The loss in market value since the October peak now approaches $2 trillion. Money did not leave the AI trade so much as move within it: AMD and Broadcom each rose about 3 percent in premarket dealing. Bernstein downgraded the shares and halved its price target to $200. Oppenheimer withdrew its target altogether, and Stifel and Citi cut theirs to $205 and $225. At about $156, Nvidia trades below 10 times the consensus fiscal 2028 earnings estimate of roughly $15.90 a share. That multiple now carries a visible discount for leadership risk.

The Business He Leaves Behind

Little in the operating record explains that discount. Revenue reached $215.9 billion in fiscal 2026, up 65 percent. In the second quarter of fiscal 2027, which ended July 26, revenue rose 106 percent to $96.2 billion. Data center sales climbed 117 percent to $89.0 billion, and gross margin held at 75.0 percent. Management guided third-quarter revenue to $108 billion, plus or minus 2 percent, without assuming any data center compute revenue from China. The products are on schedule too. Vera Rubin racks are running at CoreWeave, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Nebius. The Groq 3 LPX inference accelerator is in full production, and the roadmap through Rubin Ultra and Feynman was set out publicly at GTC in March. A change of chief executive does not alter platforms already in production or supply already under contract.

What may change is the part of the business that ran on Huang’s judgment and relationships. Analysts point to his decades-old ties with server makers and the largest cloud providers. They also point to his role in turning Nvidia into a financier of its own ecosystem. In August, Nvidia announced partnerships with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR. They aim to mobilize more than $500 billion of outside capital for AI infrastructure and still depend on definitive agreements. UBS has warned that a pause in Nvidia’s funding of AI companies could temporarily pull about $50 billion out of the sector. China is the quieter exposure. Huang was the industry’s most prominent advocate for easing export restrictions there. Guidance already excludes that revenue, but the political capital he spent in Washington now weighs on the company he left.

Succession Becomes the Product Cycle

Kress is a credible steward for the interim period. She came from Cisco in 2013 and has been the public voice of Nvidia’s guidance as the company grew from a graphics supplier into the foundation of AI computing. Holding both the chief executive and finance roles at a company of this scale, during a live investigation, is still a heavy assignment. It signals that the board values continuity over a quick permanent appointment. Jones, who has watched Nvidia since its first year, gives the board an independent center of gravity it previously lacked.

The wording closely echoes the board’s endorsement of Huang four days earlier, and investors will weigh it accordingly. The coming week will set the terms of the transition. Nvidia reports third-quarter results on November 17, its first earnings call under Kress as interim chief. The congressional briefing requested for the following day no longer has an obvious witness. Investors will look for confirmation of the Vera Rubin ramp and any change in capital returns or ecosystem investment. They will also look for the terms of Huang’s separation in regulatory filings and a timetable for both the search and the inquiry. In January, Huang said he would remain chief executive “for as long as I deserve it.” The board has now given its answer. For a decade the market valued Nvidia as a company and paid a premium for its founder. The quarters ahead will show how much of that premium belonged to each.