Nvidia Founder Jensen Huang Resigns as CEO After 33 Years; CFO Takes Interim Role

Jensen Huang resigned as President, CEO, and board member of Nvidia on Thursday after 33 years leading the company, departing immediately following a personal scandal. The exit removes the architect of the world's most valuable semiconductor company from the helm at a moment when Nvidia's chips define the global AI industry.

Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and built it from a graphics card startup into a $4 trillion enterprise whose H-series and Blackwell processors power virtually every major AI training cluster on the planet. His departure is abrupt by any measure: no transition period, no staged handover, effective immediately.

What happened: Nvidia announced Thursday that Huang has resigned from all roles — President, CEO, and board member — following a personal scandal. CFO Colette Kress will serve as Interim CEO while the board conducts a search for a permanent replacement. Harvey C. Jones, a longtime board member, has been named the company's first-ever Board Chair, a role that did not previously exist. Nvidia shares fell nearly 10% on the news, briefly pulling the company's market capitalization below $4 trillion.

Who is Colette Kress? Kress has served as Nvidia's Executive Vice President and CFO since 2013. She joined from Cisco and has overseen Nvidia's financial operations through its transformation from a gaming GPU maker into the central infrastructure vendor for the AI era. She has not previously run a business unit or held an operational leadership role, which will be a focus of investor scrutiny in coming weeks.

The board search challenge: Replacing Huang is not a simple executive search. He was not just a CEO — he was the product visionary, the culture carrier, and the external face of a company whose stock performance is inseparable from founder confidence. The board has named Jones as Chair to signal stability, but the question of who can credibly fill Huang's role operationally will dominate analyst conversations heading into Nvidia's next earnings cycle.

Market reaction: The 10% single-day drop erased hundreds of billions in market value. For context, Nvidia added roughly $1 trillion in market cap in 2026 alone on AI infrastructure demand. A 10% move at current scale represents one of the largest single-day absolute dollar losses in U.S. stock market history. Options markets priced in continued volatility through year-end.

What to watch: The board's timeline for naming a permanent CEO, any signal from Kress on whether she is a candidate for the permanent role, and how Nvidia's key customers — Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta — respond publicly in the coming days. If any of them signal concern about continuity of roadmap execution, the stock pressure will intensify.

Hector Herrera covers AI business and infrastructure at NexChron.