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Nvidia / Jensen Huang / AI Chips / AI News · November 13, 2026

Jensen Huang Has Resigned as Nvidia CEO — Four Days After the Board Opened Its Investigation

Nvidia announced on 12 November 2026 that Jensen Huang has resigned as president, CEO and board member with immediate effect, ending 33 years in charge. Colette Kress is interim CEO. The resignation follows reports of affairs and an intelligence investigation — none of it proven, and Nvidia gave no reason.

Jensen Huang Has Resigned as Nvidia CEO — Four Days After the Board Opened Its Investigation

The most consequential chief executive in AI is gone. On Thursday 12 November 2026, Nvidia announced that Jensen Huang has resigned as president, chief executive officer and a member of the board, effective immediately — ending 33 years in charge of the company he co-founded in 1993. Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress will serve as interim CEO while the board searches for a permanent successor, and former Synopsys chief Harvey C. Jones has been appointed the board's first-ever chair.

Nvidia gave no reason for the departure. The short release contains no statement from Huang, no reference to the affairs reported this week, and no findings from the independent investigation the board opened four days earlier. "Jensen's contributions to NVIDIA are profound," the board said, thanking him for his "immeasurable contributions to the company and the industry."

The resignation is confirmed fact — it is Nvidia's own announcement. Everything about why it happened is, for now, reporting and allegation. Keep those two layers apart, because this story is where they collide.

What Nvidia actually said

The release is three decisions in one paragraph: Huang resigns, Kress takes over on an interim basis while keeping her CFO role, and the board starts a search that will consider internal and external candidates. Jones, the new chair, said the board has "full confidence in Colette and the leadership team" and expects "operations, customer commitments and product roadmap to continue without interruption."

Kress, who has been Nvidia's finance chief since September 2013, said she was "committed to building on the extraordinary foundation Jensen created over the last 33 years." During her tenure, the company's annual revenue rose from $4.13 billion in fiscal 2014 to $215.9 billion in fiscal 2026. Before Nvidia she held senior finance roles at Texas Instruments, Microsoft and Cisco.

One date in the release is unchanged: Nvidia will still report third-quarter fiscal 2027 results on Tuesday 17 November, with the earnings call the same afternoon. That call — Kress's first as interim chief, five days after the resignation — is now the most watched earnings event of the year.

The four days that led here

The resignation did not come out of nowhere. It was the end of a four-day sequence that moved faster than any board process in Nvidia's history:

The investigation itself has published no findings and no completion date. The transition release does not state a reason for the departure, and the board has not said whether the investigation will continue now that its subject has left.

The allegation layer: what is and is not proven

The reporting that set this sequence in motion began with an unpublished US intelligence memo, first reported by the Financial Times on 7 November, which reportedly states that Huang had a romantic relationship with Alice Huang, a former senior executive at the Singapore data-center company Megaspeed. US intelligence reportedly believes she was recruited by China's Ministry of State Security to gather information on Huang and on US AI-chip policy. The New York Times had reported the recruitment assessment days earlier, on 29 October and 6 November. We covered the memo, the Megaspeed chip deals underneath it and the congressional response in detail in The Nvidia Spy Scare, Explained.

None of that has been proven anywhere the public can test it. The memo is unpublished and unseen by any outside party. There are no charges against anyone. Nvidia says its own review found no evidence of chips being diverted to China, describes its dealings with Megaspeed as routine customer business, and says no secrets were shared. China's Foreign Ministry called the reports a baseless smear. Beijing denies Alice Huang is a spy. And as Al Jazeera's reporting notes, "there is no established evidence he knowingly assisted Beijing or that company secrets were compromised."

What is documented is the machinery underneath the allegation: Megaspeed's Malaysian sister company bought at least $4.8 billion of advanced AI equipment containing Nvidia chips between June 2024 and February 2026, according to trade records cited by the New York Times, and US authorities suspect more than 136,000 Nvidia GPUs were leased or exported onward. The second reported relationship, with Powell, raises a different question — a potential conflict of interest involving a senior executive who reported to the chief executive — and it, too, is a report, not a finding.

Huang's admission on Sunday was about infidelity, not espionage. An admission of personal misconduct is not an admission of anything else, and a reported suspicion about another person is not proof of an intelligence operation. The honest summary, as it was on Monday, is still two sentences: the personal allegation is unproven; the world that makes it plausible is documented.

The market reaction

Investors did not wait for the findings. Nvidia shares fell more than 10% in premarket trading on Thursday, were down more than 14% at one point during the session, and closed down 4.3% at $166.19 — the lowest close since 30 March, according to Dow Jones Market Data cited by Barron's. The major US indexes also closed lower.

The reaction is about more than one executive. Nvidia is a roughly $4 trillion company that controls an estimated 90% of the market for advanced AI chips, and Huang had no succession plan: Reuters reports he oversaw some 60 direct reports and personally dived into problems across the company. His exit, Reuters wrote, "plunges the $4 trillion company into uncertainty and threatens to disrupt an AI ecosystem that he helped bankroll" — pouring Nvidia's cash into cloud providers, suppliers and the biggest AI labs. Investor sentiment toward AI stocks was already shaky, with soaring cash burn and rising debt at cash-rich tech giants fuelling doubts over whether the AI boom will pay off.

Who runs Nvidia now — and who could be next

Kress is the continuity candidate: thirteen years as CFO, deep relationships with Wall Street, and the board's public confidence. Whether she becomes permanent chief is, in Nvidia's own words, undecided — the search will consider internal and external candidates.

The names being discussed, according to Reuters and Al Jazeera, include Kress herself; Ian Buck, Nvidia's vice president of hyperscale and high-performance computing, who joined in 2004 and helped turn a games chipmaker into an AI hardware company; Rene Haas, chief executive of Arm, who spent seven formative years at Nvidia; Harvey Jones, the new chair, who has sat on Nvidia's board since 1993; Lisa Su, who leads AMD, Nvidia's main rival; and Sanjay Mehrotra, chief executive of Micron. President Donald Trump suggested a different name on Truth Social on Thursday: former Apple chief executive Tim Cook, writing "A Legend replaces a Legend." Cook stepped down as Apple's chief executive in September and now serves as its executive chairman; there is no indication he is interested in the job.

The succession question reaches beyond Nvidia's org chart. Nvidia is not only a chip supplier but an investor in the companies that build and rent AI computing — and, according to Al Jazeera, is preparing to invest approximately $10 billion in Anthropic as part of the AI lab's planned stock-market listing, expected next week. Hugging Face chief executive Clement Delangue reaffirmed his commitment to open-source AI after the resignation, as Nvidia — which Al Jazeera reports has agreed to acquire Hugging Face — searches for a new chief. And Huang's departure lands in the middle of the live fight over the H200 chip: he spent years campaigning against restrictions on selling advanced AI chips to China, and in December 2025 the Trump administration approved H200 exports subject to inspections, shipment limits, military-use restrictions and a 25% tariff. Chinese companies have reportedly ordered more than two million H200 chips, potentially worth $54 billion — orders, not completed sales, as Al Jazeera notes.

What to watch next

Three dates matter now. 17 November: Nvidia's third-quarter results and earnings call, Kress's first public test as interim chief. 18 November: the closed-door briefing the Republican chairs of three House committees requested from Huang about his interactions with Alice Huang and Nvidia's safeguards against foreign espionage — a request that now hangs over a former chief executive, with US lawmakers looking into the national-security implications. And, with no date attached: whatever the independent investigation concludes, if it concludes anything publicly at all.

The departure also leaves the AI industry without its most visible champion at the exact moment the boom he helped build is being questioned — on valuations, on cash burn, on export policy, and now on the governance of the company at its centre. Nvidia says operations, customer commitments and the product roadmap will continue without interruption. That is a claim to be tested, not evidence. The next chief executive of the world's most important AI company will inherit the chips, the customers and the cash — and the investigation, the export fight and the question of who, if anyone, can replace a founder who ran the company for 33 years.

Sources and classification

Classification: Confirmed News for the resignation itself (Nvidia's own announcement, 12 November 2026). Rumor/Leak for the underlying personal allegation (an unpublished intelligence memo as reported by the Financial Times and the New York Times; unconfirmed; no charges; denials carried in-article). Market figures are attributed to their outlets. Checked 13 November 2026.

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