NVIDIA’s founder era ended on Thursday. The chipmaker announced on November 12, 2026, that Jensen Huang has resigned as President, Chief Executive Officer and a member of the Board, effective immediately — closing out a 33-year run in which Huang turned a graphics-chip startup founded in 1993 into the world’s most valuable AI company.
Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress will run the company as interim CEO while the board searches for a permanent successor. The announcement lands five days before NVIDIA reports quarterly results, making next Tuesday’s earnings call the first major test of the post-Huang era.
What NVIDIA Announced
NVIDIA’s board announced the transition in a statement issued on November 12 and filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as an exhibit to a Form 8-K. According to the filing, the board accepted Huang’s resignation on Wednesday, November 11. Read NVIDIA’s official announcement and Technology.org’s report on the transition for the full details.
The statement was short on explanation. It gave no reason for the resignation, included no quote from Huang, and disclosed no new role for him at the company. Instead, the board thanked Huang for what it called his “immeasurable contributions to the company and the industry.”
Three changes take effect at once:
- Jensen Huang is out as president, CEO and director, effective immediately.
- Colette Kress becomes interim CEO while keeping her roles as executive vice president and chief financial officer until a permanent successor is named.
- Harvey C. Jones becomes the board’s first-ever chair, a role NVIDIA had never filled before.
The board said it has begun a search for a permanent chief executive and will consider both internal and external candidates. It gave no timeline for naming a successor.
Who Is Colette Kress?
Colette Kress, 59, has been NVIDIA’s executive vice president and chief financial officer since September 2013. Before joining NVIDIA, she spent nearly 25 years in finance roles at leading technology companies, including Cisco and Microsoft.
During her tenure, Kress led NVIDIA’s finance organization through the company’s transformation from a gaming-graphics business into the dominant supplier of AI accelerators — a period in which NVIDIA’s revenue and market value grew many times over. She is widely credited with building the financial discipline behind the company’s data-center expansion, and she has been a familiar voice on NVIDIA’s earnings calls for more than a decade.
In the company’s announcement, Kress struck a continuity note: “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.”
Board chair Harvey Jones offered a similar message, saying Kress “is supported by an experienced leadership team that has been instrumental in executing NVIDIA’s strategy and advancing its technology roadmap. The Board has full confidence in Colette and the leadership team, and we expect the company’s operations, customer commitments and product roadmap to continue without interruption.”
Kress’s dual role — interim CEO and CFO — is unusual for a company of NVIDIA’s size, but it gives the board a steady hand who already knows the business, its customers and its finances intimately while the search for a permanent chief runs.
A First-Ever Board Chair
The appointment of Harvey C. Jones as chair is a governance milestone in its own right: NVIDIA had never previously had a chair of the board. Jones, 73, has been an NVIDIA director since 1993 — the year the company was founded — and previously served as chief executive officer and executive chairman of Synopsys.
Jones’s elevation signals that the board intends to play a more active oversight role during the transition. As chair, he will lead the CEO search and serve as the board’s public face alongside Kress, a structure that separates board leadership from day-to-day management for the first time in NVIDIA’s history.
The Context: What NVIDIA Has — and Has Not — Said
The resignation did not come out of nowhere. On November 8, NVIDIA’s board said it had launched an independent investigation “in light of recent reporting” that Huang “has been the target of a foreign intelligence effort,” adding that it had no reason to believe national security or company secrets were compromised.
Press reports in the days before the resignation — including reporting by The New York Times and the Financial Times, as summarized by other outlets — linked the controversy to reports about Huang’s relationship with a woman alleged to have links to Chinese intelligence services. NVIDIA has not confirmed any reason for the resignation, and neither the company’s announcement nor its SEC filing offers one. The board has not said whether its investigation continues or whether it will publish its findings.
That silence matters. Investors, customers and partners are left to weigh an official record that says only that the founder has stepped down, against press reports the company has not confirmed. Until NVIDIA says more, the responsible reading is the official one: the board accepted the resignation of a CEO who led the company for 33 years, and it has moved quickly to put experienced leadership in place.
How the Market Reacted
Wall Street’s first reaction was sharp. NVIDIA shares fell more than 10% in premarket trading on Thursday, according to Reuters, before paring some of the decline during the regular session and closing lower on the day. Rival chipmakers moved the other way: AMD and Broadcom shares rose on the same day, as investors weighed whether NVIDIA’s leadership shock could shift competitive momentum in the AI accelerator market. Investopedia’s coverage of the resignation and the stock reaction provides further detail on the trading day.
The scale of the move reflects just how closely NVIDIA’s identity has been tied to Huang. He was not merely the company’s chief executive; he was its public face, its chief product evangelist and, for many investors, the reason to own the stock. His keynote presentations routinely moved markets, and his personal credibility underpinned NVIDIA’s premium valuation. A sudden departure — with no succession plan announced in advance — is exactly the kind of event markets price harshly.
Whether the sell-off proves to be a buying opportunity or the start of a reassessment depends on what happens next, and the first data point arrives very soon.
What Happens Next: The November 17 Earnings Call
NVIDIA confirmed that its schedule has not changed. The company will report third-quarter fiscal 2027 results on Tuesday, November 17, at approximately 1:20 p.m. Pacific Time, followed by an earnings call at 2 p.m. Pacific Time.
That call will be Kress’s first as interim CEO, and it will be watched far more closely than a routine earnings report. Analysts and investors will be listening for three things: reassurance that the product roadmap — including the next generation of AI accelerators — is on track, clarity on demand from cloud customers and sovereign AI projects, and any hint about the shape or timing of the permanent CEO search.
For context on the roadmap at stake, NVIDIA has been expanding its partnerships aggressively, including teaming up with Rebellions and SK Telecom to build Korea’s sovereign AI backbone and bringing its Nemotron models to Box’s enterprise AI workflows. The company’s AI infrastructure ambitions extend well beyond chips, and whoever leads NVIDIA next inherits a pipeline that spans data centers, robotics and sovereign AI programs around the world.
What the Transition Means for the AI Industry
NVIDIA sits at the center of the AI economy. Its GPUs power the training and inference of nearly every major AI model, and its CUDA software platform has become the default infrastructure for AI development. A leadership change at NVIDIA is therefore not just a corporate governance story — it is an event for the entire industry.
Three implications stand out.
First, continuity is the immediate priority. NVIDIA’s message has been consistent: operations, customer commitments and the product roadmap continue without interruption. That message matters to partners across the ecosystem, from the ElevenLabs summit where its NVIDIA deal took center stage to the cloud providers building data centers around NVIDIA hardware. Kress’s deep institutional knowledge and Jones’s board experience are meant to reassure customers making multi-billion-dollar infrastructure bets that NVIDIA remains a reliable partner.
Second, competition will not wait. AMD has been gaining ground with its Instinct accelerators — its EPYC 6 Venice server CPUs and Instinct line are aimed squarely at data-center workloads NVIDIA dominates — while Google is advancing its own custom silicon with new TPU systems for confidential inference and massive-context AI agents. Rivals will use any uncertainty at NVIDIA to pitch customers on alternatives.
Third, the permanent CEO choice will define NVIDIA’s next decade. The board’s decision to consider external candidates as well as internal ones suggests it is open to a leader from outside the company. Whoever takes the job must manage the world’s most scrutinized AI supply chain, navigate U.S.–China technology tensions, and sustain a pace of innovation that has made NVIDIA synonymous with AI itself.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Jensen Huang resign as NVIDIA CEO?
NVIDIA has not given a reason. Its November 12 announcement says only that Huang resigned as president, CEO and board member, effective immediately. The board had opened an independent investigation on November 8 into reports that Huang was the target of a foreign intelligence effort, but the company has not confirmed any connection between that investigation and the resignation.
Who is NVIDIA’s interim CEO?
Colette Kress, NVIDIA’s executive vice president and chief financial officer since September 2013. She will serve as interim CEO while continuing as CFO until a permanent successor is named.
Who is Harvey C. Jones?
Harvey C. Jones is NVIDIA’s first-ever Chair of the Board. He has been an NVIDIA director since 1993 and previously served as CEO and executive chairman of Synopsys.
When will NVIDIA report earnings?
NVIDIA will report third-quarter fiscal 2027 results on Tuesday, November 17, at approximately 1:20 p.m. Pacific Time, followed by an earnings call at 2 p.m. Pacific Time, as previously scheduled.
Will NVIDIA’s product roadmap change?
According to the company, no. The board said it expects operations, customer commitments and the product roadmap to continue without interruption under interim CEO Colette Kress.
The Bottom Line
Jensen Huang’s resignation ends one of the longest and most consequential CEO tenures in technology history. In 33 years, he built NVIDIA from a three-person startup into the engine of the AI revolution — and then stepped down without explanation, five days before earnings.
Colette Kress now holds the job on an interim basis, backed by a board that has, for the first time, a chair of its own. The machinery of NVIDIA — its chips, its software, its roadmap — has not changed overnight. But the company that built the AI era now has to prove it can outlast the founder who defined it. The November 17 earnings call is the first chance to start.
