American billionaire Jensen Huang resigns as Nvidia CEO after board investigation

Jensen Huang has resigned as CEO of Nvidia, ending a 33-year run at the helm of the company he cofounded in 1993 and built into the world’s leading supplier of AI chips.

Nvidia announced the move on Thursday. It follows an affair scandal and a board investigation into concerns that Huang may have been the subject of a foreign intelligence effort. CFO Colette Kress will serve as interim CEO while the company searches for a permanent successor. She said she is committed to building on the “extraordinary foundation Jensen created over the last 33 years.” Nvidia also named board member Harvey Jones, the former CEO of Synopsys, as its first executive chairman.

Investors reacted sharply. Nvidia shares fell as much as 13% at the open on Thursday, extending losses since the scandal emerged, before recovering to trade about 5% lower by late morning.

When the investigation surfaced earlier this week, Huang told staff in a memo that he had been unfaithful to his wife. In late October, The New York Times reported that he had a close relationship with Alice Huang, an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based cloud provider and Nvidia client. The paper said US officials believed she had been recruited to gather information about Nvidia for the Chinese government. US authorities have also scrutinized Megaspeed over suspicions that it helped China access restricted Nvidia chips. China has repeatedly said the spying allegations are unsubstantiated.

Separately, The Times reported on Wednesday, citing anonymous sources, that Huang had an affair with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of healthcare. Powell did not respond to the paper’s request for comment.

Huang, 63, has led Nvidia since its inception. The company grew from a little-known graphics card maker, best known for powering video games, into the leading supplier of chips for the AI boom. Its share price is up more than 10,000% from about $2 a decade ago to a peak of $240 in October, and its $4 trillion market capitalization makes it the world’s second-most valuable company behind Alphabet.

Huang has been deeply involved in product strategy and has built long-standing relationships with customers, manufacturing partners and government officials, which raises questions about Nvidia’s future without him.

Rarely spotted without his trademark leather jacket, he became one of the tech world’s best-known figures, alongside Sam Altman, Dario Amodei and Mark Zuckerberg, and an emblem of the new class of AI executives dominating business in 2026.

His fortune has swelled with the stock. Huang is worth $145 billion, making him the 13th-richest person on Earth, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index.