Jensen Huang has resigned as Nvidia's president, chief executive officer and a member of its board, effective immediately, the company said on Thursday, November 12. The departure ends a 33-year run for the co-founder who built Nvidia from a graphics-chip maker for gamers into the dominant supplier of processors for artificial intelligence. Nvidia said its board accepted the resignation on Wednesday.
Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress will serve as interim chief executive while continuing as executive vice president and chief financial officer, the company said. The board will consider both internal and external candidates for the permanent job. Nvidia also named Harvey C. Jones, a longtime director and former chief executive of Synopsys, as its first chair of the board. In a memo reported by Reuters, Kress told employees the company will hold a meeting on November 18 at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time.
Markets reacted sharply. Reuters reported that Nvidia shares tumbled more than 14 percent in early trading on Thursday before paring losses, and the company was still on course to shed nearly 200 billion dollars in market value that day. Shares of rivals AMD and Broadcom rose about 6 percent each, Reuters said, as investors weighed whether turmoil at Nvidia could create openings for competitors. USA Today reported that, including the week's earlier losses, Nvidia had shed about 600 billion dollars in market value since the board investigation was announced.
The resignation follows a fast-moving week. On November 8, Nvidia said independent directors, assisted by outside legal counsel, would oversee an investigation into whether Huang had been the target of a foreign intelligence operation. At that time, the board said it had no reason to believe that national security or Nvidia's secrets had been compromised, and it expressed confidence in Huang. In a message to employees the same day, Huang acknowledged that he had been unfaithful to his wife, apologized to his family and colleagues, and said he would cooperate with the review.
Reporting since then has raised further questions, none of which Nvidia's resignation announcement resolved. The company gave no reason for the departure in its announcement and did not report findings from the investigation. Reuters reported that the board met on Wednesday to consider Huang's removal, following a New York Times report of a second relationship involving a senior Nvidia executive. TechCrunch noted that Nvidia, Huang and the executive named in that report have not confirmed it. Separately, Beijing has denied an allegation reported by United States officials about the first relationship, according to Reuters.
For enterprise buyers, the immediate question is execution, not the product roadmap. Nvidia's next several years of chip plans are already largely visible, and the company kept its fiscal third-quarter results on the calendar for November 17. What a new chief executive must hold together is a complex system of cloud providers, server makers, suppliers and large AI laboratories that Huang personally coordinated for decades. Huang, 63, remains a major shareholder, with a stake of about 3.6 percent, but he will have no executive or board role as that transition begins.
Photo: Jensen Huang speaking at a conference in 2018. Photograph by Raysonho, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0 via Wikimedia Commons.