THE CRUNCH

Jensen Huang has resigned as president, chief executive and board member of Nvidia, effective immediately, the company's board announced on Thursday. The board said it accepted his resignation on Wednesday and has begun a search for a permanent chief executive, considering both internal and external candidates. Chief financial officer Colette Kress will serve as interim CEO while keeping her existing role.

The resignation follows a run of damaging reports about Huang's personal life. Over the weekend, he admitted in a company-wide apology that he had been unfaithful to his wife. Reports have alleged two extramarital affairs: one with Alice Huang, a Megaspeed executive whom US intelligence agencies suspect may be a Chinese intelligence asset, and another with Kimberly Powell, an Nvidia vice president who reported directly to him. Megaspeed is separately reported to be under investigation over the smuggling of $2 billion worth of export-controlled Nvidia GPUs into China. When announcing its investigation, Nvidia's board said it had no reason to believe that either national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised, and President Donald Trump has said the FBI is also investigating.

The fallout has been severe. Nvidia's shares fell more than 10 per cent in early trading on Thursday, and the company has shed roughly $1.4 trillion in market value since late October, when the New York Times first reported on the possible ties to Chinese intelligence. TechCrunch separately tallied a fall of as much as 19 per cent and more than $855 billion in market cap since Friday; the two figures cover different periods and are not directly comparable.

The board has also appointed Harvey C. Jones, a director since 1993 and former CEO of Synopsys, as Nvidia's first-ever chair of the board. Jones said the company expects operations, customer commitments and the product roadmap to continue without interruption, and Kress pledged to keep advancing Nvidia's work in accelerated computing and AI.

Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and led it for 33 years, transforming it from a graphics chip maker into the dominant supplier of hardware for the AI industry. The Decoder notes the transition will be difficult because the company was built around him: he left no clear succession plan, with more than 60 employees reporting directly to him, and had assembled a web of financial guarantees, roughly $300 billion by that account, to support smaller customers and keep rivals at bay.

Earlier on this story

  1. 9 Nov

    Nvidia board investigates Jensen Huang affair with alleged Chinese spy

  2. 10 Nov

    Law firms circle Nvidia as Trump says FBI is looking into Huang affair

Since this brief

  1. 13 Nov

    Congress summons ex-Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang over security concerns

Crunchy Tech briefs on this story.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

The board's search for a permanent chief executive is under way, covering internal and external candidates. The board had also launched an independent investigation into the national security questions raised by the reports. PC Gamer reports Huang had been invited to speak with US congressional officials on national security and foreign affairs.