Nvidia’s Jensen Huang resigns, chipmaker names CFO Colette Kress as interim CEO

Jensen Huang has resigned from his position as president and chief executive of Nvidia, the company said on Thursday, just a few days after he admitted to a romantic affair with an alleged Chinese spy, sparking a U.S. national security crisis.

In a regulatory filing, Nvidia said its board accepted Huang’s resignation on Wednesday.

Nvidia said its current chief financial officer and executive vice president, Collete Kress, will take over as interim CEO until the company finds a permanent successor. Kress will continue to serve as the company’s CFO.

Nvidia’s shares were down nearly 12% in early morning trading on Thursday. Since Friday, the company’s stock has fallen dramatically, resulting in a market cap loss of more than $300 billion.

The potential implications of Huang’s departure for the AI and data center industries are vast, given how active Huang, and by extension Nvidia, has been in furthering the AI boom. In particular, it raises questions about the future of Nvidia’s sprawling AI investments, which have helped bankroll everything from startups developing new technologies to the enormous data centers needed to run them.

Under Huang, Nvidia deftly used its financial muscle to support companies buying its chips, effectively helping to finance the market for its own products, as well as lobbying Washington to relax potential rules around AI and data center regulation.

As of the end of its second quarter, Nvidia reported, Nvidia reported $99 billion worth of investments and another $25 billion of commitments. It also has $36 billion in cloud service commitments, which are arrangements that help AI cloud operators finance the GPUs and data center equipment they buy from Nvidia, with the chipmaker saying it will buy compute from them and potentially earn a share of their operators’ revenue.

Nvidia has also been investing directly in neoclouds, the companies serving a lot of the AI processing needs. In January, the company invested $2 billion in CoreWeave, and another $2 billion in Nebius in March. The chipmaker was said to be considering being a guarantor for Nscale’s planned West Virginia data center project. It’s also signed up to provide up to $105 billion worth of credit guarantees for an OpenAI data center campus in Ohio.

Investors were already uneasy with the enormous amounts of debt companies in the space were raising to sustain the AI infrastructure buildout, and Huang’s exit throws another uncertainty-shaped wrench into the works. CoreWeave’s shares were down about 12% premarket on Thursday, reversing part of a 25% rally on Wednesday, while Nebius is down 20%. IREN fell 8%.

Nvidia’s board has also appointed Harvey Jones, a managing partner of Square Wave Ventures and former CEO of Synopsys, as the company’s first-ever chair of the board of directors. Jones has been on Nvidia’s board since 1993.

“Jensen’s contributions to NVIDIA are profound. NVIDIA is one of the most consequential technology companies in the world. The Board and the company thank Jensen for his immeasurable contributions to the company and the industry,” the company said in a statement.

This story is developing…