Nvidia’s Jensen Huang resigns, chipmaker names CFO Colette Kress as interim CEO

Jensen Huang has resigned from his position as president and chief executive of Nvidia, the company said on Thursday, just a few days after he admitted to a romantic affair with an alleged Chinese spy, sparking a U.S. national security crisis.

In a regulatory filing, Nvidia said its board accepted Huang’s resignation on Wednesday.

Nvidia said its current chief financial officer and executive vice president, Collete Kress, will take over as interim CEO until the company finds a permanent successor. Kress will continue to serve as the company’s CFO.

Nvidia’s shares were down more than 11% in premarket trading on Thursday. Since Friday, the company’s stock has fallen dramatically, resulting in a market cap loss of more than $300 billion.

The potential implications of Huang’s departure for the AI and data center industries are vast, given how active Huang, and by extension Nvidia, has been in furthering the AI boom. In particular, it raises questions about the future of Nvidia’s sprawling AI investments, which have helped bankroll everything from startups developing new technologies to the enormous data centers needed to run them.

Under Huang, Nvidia deftly used its financial muscle to support companies buying its chips, effectively helping to finance the market for its own products, as well as lobbying Washington to relax potential rules around AI and data center regulation.

The scale of Nvidia’s commitments is considerable. As of the end of its second quarter, Nvidia reported, Nvidia reported $99 billion in equity investments and another $25 billion in investment commitments. It also disclosed $36 billion in cloud service commitments under arrangements that help AI cloud operators finance additional Nvidia-powered infrastructure, with the chipmaker agreeing to purchase computing capacity and potentially earn a share of the operators’ revenue.

Nvidia’s board has also appointed Harvey Jones, a managing partner of Square Wave Ventures and former CEO of Synopsys, as the company’s first-ever chair of the board of directors. Jones has been on Nvidia’s board since 1993.

“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,” the company said in a statement.

This story is developing…

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Ram is a financial and tech reporter and editor. He covered North American and European M&A, equity, regulatory news and debt markets at Reuters and Acuris Global, and has also written about travel, tourism, entertainment and books.

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