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Four days after Nvidia's board said it retained confidence in Jensen Huang, the chief executive who built the world's most valuable chipmaker is gone. Nvidia announced on Thursday that Huang has resigned as president, chief executive and a member of the board, effective immediately — ending a 33-year run at the top of the company that powers the artificial-intelligence boom.
The announcement capped the fastest corporate downfall of the AI era. On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the board was preparing to remove Huang; by Thursday morning, he had gone. Investors did not wait for the details: Nvidia shares fell more than 10% in premarket trading, and the shock spread across the chip sector.
What Nvidia announced
According to the company's statement, the board accepted Huang's resignation on Wednesday and announced it on Thursday morning. Chief financial officer Colette Kress will serve as interim chief executive, and the board has begun searching for a permanent successor, considering both internal and external candidates. The board also appointed Harvey C. Jones, the former Synopsys chief executive, as its first-ever chair.
The statement gave no reason for the resignation. It thanked Huang for what it called his "immeasurable contributions to the company and the industry". Huang, 63, co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and owns about 3.6% of the company's stock. He will hold no executive position and no seat on the board.
Kress is the only other Nvidia executive with much of a public profile. She joined the company in September 2013 and has been its chief financial officer ever since. She now takes charge five days before Nvidia reports third-quarter results on Tuesday, November 17 — an earnings day that was already the most watched on the calendar and now carries far more weight.
How the market reacted
The market's verdict was immediate and brutal. Barron's reported that Nvidia shares fell 12.5% to $152.02 in premarket trading, while The Times put the fall at more than 10% and said it wiped more than $400 billion off the company's value. The Times also reported that more than $600 billion has been wiped off Nvidia's value this week, and the Wall Street Journal said the leadership crisis was on track to erase nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars.
The damage spread well beyond one stock. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, which makes Nvidia's chips, fell 5% in premarket trading; CoreWeave was down 14% and Micron 6%, according to The Times. Nasdaq-100 futures fell around 1.2%, and CNBC counted six analyst downgrades of Nvidia between Wednesday night and Thursday morning. Barron's reported the shares were on pace for their lowest close since July last year.
It is the second leg of a sell-off that began on Wednesday evening, when reports that the board was preparing to remove Huang sent the shares down almost 10% in after-hours trading. What was speculation then is fact now — and the market has treated the confirmation as worse than the rumour.
How we got here
The crisis began with a different relationship. In a staff memo on Sunday, Huang admitted he had been unfaithful to his wife, writing that there was "no excuse for what I did" and apologising to his family and colleagues. The woman in that case was Alice Huang, a senior executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based data-centre company and Nvidia customer, whom US intelligence assessments — described in a memo overseen by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and reported by The New York Times — concluded had been recruited by China's Ministry of State Security. That is an allegation, not an established finding, and Huang has not admitted that she was a spy.
On the same day, Nvidia's board opened an independent investigation, led by a committee of independent directors and outside legal counsel, into whether Huang had been targeted by a foreign intelligence operation. The board said it had "no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised" and that it retained confidence in Huang.
The turning point came on Wednesday, when The New York Times reported a second relationship — with Kimberly Powell, 48, Nvidia's vice-president of healthcare, who reports directly to Huang — citing five people who have worked at the company. A relationship with a direct report is a governance question, not only a personal one, and within hours the Wall Street Journal reported that the board was preparing to oust Huang and could meet as soon as Wednesday to decide his future. On Thursday morning, the decision was announced — as a resignation, not a removal.
Why this reaches beyond one chief executive
Nvidia is not just another big company. Its processors are the hardware the AI boom runs on, and Huang — its co-founder and chief executive since 1993 — has been the public face of that boom, arguing loudly in Washington that the United States should ease restrictions on selling advanced AI chips to China. The Times calls Nvidia the world's second most valuable company, behind Apple. Yet, as USA Today noted, Huang has no obvious successor, and Barron's reported that dozens of executives reported directly to him — a structure built entirely around one man.
That is why the board's search matters as much as the resignation. Nvidia's 2026 proxy statement says nothing about succession planning for the chief executive, and the board must now find a leader for the most important company in the AI trade while the trade itself is shaking. The questions pile up fast: three House committees have reportedly requested a closed-door briefing with Huang for November 18, and the earnings call on November 17 will be Kress's first test in front of investors. The same week has already raised questions about how much of the AI boom rests on a handful of leaders — including Elon Musk, whose companies are now openly discussing a SpaceX–Tesla combination.
There is also a wider lesson in how fast this moved. On Sunday the story was a personal admission and a board inquiry. By Wednesday it was a second allegation, a reported plan to remove the chief executive, and a near-10% share plunge. On Thursday the chief executive was gone. Each step made the next one easier: the admission invited scrutiny, the scrutiny produced a second report, and the second report gave the board a governance case it did not have before. Scandals rarely end a chief executive on their own. What ends them is the moment a board decides the story has become the company — and this week, Nvidia's board reached exactly that moment.
The resignation answers the question the market has been asking all week — whether Huang would survive — and replaces it with harder ones. Who runs the company that runs the AI boom? What does the interim chief executive tell investors on November 17? And can the AI trade hold its nerve without the man who embodied it? Until the board names a successor, the most valuable chipmaker in the world is being run by a caretaker — and the market has already delivered its verdict on the uncertainty. Read the original reporting in USA Today and the market reaction in Barron's.