Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigns amid spy, affair scandals

Nvidia’s board announced that Jensen Huang — its longtime co-founder, president, and CEO — has resigned after reports of two extramarital affairs, one with an alleged Chinese spy and one with an Nvidia executive who reported to Huang. Following a late Wednesday night meeting, the board accepted Huang’s letter of resignation as CEO, president, and board member, effective immediately, with current CFO Colette Kress appointed interim CEO. Kress has been with Nvidia since 2013, with previous stops at Cisco and Microsoft.

Nvidia is also changing its corporate structure in Huang’s absence, appointing former Synopsys CEO Harvey C. Jones as the first board chair in its history. The statement does not include a statement from Huang, while Kress is quoted as saying:

NVIDIA’s strength has always come from its people, and together with our leadership team, I am committed to building on the extraordinary foundation Jensen created over the last 33 years. We will continue advancing the work that has made NVIDIA a leader in accelerated computing and AI, and execute on the opportunities ahead. Our focus remains on serving our customers, partners, developers and shareholders.

Now Nvidia says, “The Board is initiating a search for a permanent Chief Executive Officer and will consider internal and external candidates,” and reports about who that might be have already surfaced, putting Kress, Apple hardware chief Johny Srouji, Nvidia VP Ian Buck, AMD CEO (and cousin of Jensen Huang) Lisa Su, and Arm CEO Rene Haas at the top of the list.

Huang had been at the helm of what’s now known as the most powerful company in AI since its founding in 1993. In the years since, it’s become the main purveyor of the chips fueling AI advancement and deployment in the US, and it has enjoyed near-unbridled power and influence — demand for Nvidia’s chips constantly outpaces supply, and AI CEOs are constantly putting in requests to buy more, sometimes to no avail. Nvidia’s investment portfolio — worth about $99 billion and spanning AI companies from frontier labs to neoclouds — has also granted it a lot of sway in the AI space. And in recent years, Huang himself has enjoyed a close relationship with President Donald Trump.

Over the past week, that influence has been a double-edged sword for Huang, after news broke that he had been involved in a romantic relationship with Alice Huang (no relation), an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based cloud provider and big customer of Nvidia itself. The Megaspeed executive was also allegedly a surveillance operative passing information along to China’s Ministry of State Security. She was focused on gaining information about advanced AI chips in the US and trying to influence the technology being made available to China, The New York Times reported. Huang admitted he had been “unfaithful” to his wife and apologized to his family and shareholders in a memo to Nvidia employees over the weekend.

As The Verge wrote earlier this week, “questions are swirling around how the affair may have influenced Huang’s reported push to sell advanced chips to China — and potentially even influenced President Trump’s own decisions surrounding AI export controls.”

As of Monday, analysts, venture capitalists and even Trump had expected Huang would come out the other side of the scandal with his chief executive status intact. Silicon Valley insiders, including Elon Musk, had backed him despite the news. But on Wednesday, news broke that Huang had had a second extramarital affair — this time with an executive reporting directly to him. The New York Times, citing five people who worked at Nvidia, identified the relationship as being with Nvidia’s VP of healthcare, Kimberly Powell. Soon after the news broke, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter, that Nvidia’s board was meeting as soon as Wednesday evening in order to decide Huang’s future at the company and potentially oust him from his role.