Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is stepping down, the company said Thursday, ending the run of the chief executive who turned the chipmaker into the world's most valuable company and the central supplier of the artificial-intelligence boom.
Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress will take over as interim CEO while Nvidia searches for a permanent successor, the company said. It named former Synopsys CEO and board member Harvey Jones as its first-ever board chairman. Huang, who co-founded Nvidia and is its fourth-largest investor with a stake of about 3.61%, will exit the board as well. Nvidia shares fell more than 10% in premarket trading.
Pressure had been mounting on Huang in recent days after reports said the 63-year-old, who is married, had an affair with a Chinese businesswoman U.S. authorities suspect of spying for Beijing. Nvidia's board met Wednesday to consider his ouster, a person familiar with the matter said, after reports earlier in the day that Huang also had an extramarital affair with a senior company executive who reported to him.
The scrutiny centers on Alice Huang, a former executive at Singapore-based cloud company Megaspeed whom U.S. authorities have concluded was a Chinese intelligence asset. The two, who have been photographed together in Taiwan, Singapore and California, are not related. Washington has also investigated Megaspeed, a coveted official Nvidia cloud partner with priority access to its chips, over suspicions it helped China obtain advanced AI chips restricted under U.S. export controls. Beijing has denied Alice Huang is a spy.
Earlier this month, Nvidia's board launched a probe, led by independent directors with outside legal counsel, into whether Jensen Huang had been targeted by a foreign intelligence operation, and expressed confidence in him at the time. The controversy escalated Wednesday when the New York Times reported Huang also had an affair with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice president of healthcare, who reported to him.
Huang's exit plunges the $4 trillion company into uncertainty and threatens to disrupt an AI ecosystem he helped bankroll by pouring Nvidia's swelling cash pile back into cloud providers, suppliers and the industry's biggest labs. Investor sentiment toward AI stocks was already shaky as soaring cash burn and rising debt at traditionally cash-rich tech giants fuel doubts over whether the AI boom will pay off. The departure could also have far-reaching consequences for U.S. chip export policy, given Huang's push to preserve access to the Chinese market and his close ties with President Donald Trump, who said Sunday that Huang had "done an amazing job for our country" and that the Nvidia chief had told him he had no idea the Chinese woman he had an affair with was a spy.
