Jensen Huang Resigns as Nvidia CEO After Spy Scandal and Second Affair Allegation

Jensen Huang resigned Wednesday as president, chief executive officer, and board member of Nvidia, effective immediately, ending a 33-year tenure at the company he co-founded in 1993. The world's most valuable semiconductor company, worth more than four trillion dollars at its peak, now faces a leadership transition it never planned for.

The resignation followed a board investigation into reports of two extramarital affairs. One affair involved a woman U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded was recruited by China's Ministry of State Security; the second was alleged to involve a Nvidia vice president who reported directly to him.

Nvidia's board named Colette Kress, the company's executive vice president and chief financial officer since September 2013, as interim chief executive officer. Kress, 58, will retain her CFO responsibilities while the board conducts a search for a permanent replacement considering both internal and external candidates. Harvey C. Jones, a venture investor and technology executive with more than 30 years of experience and formerly chief executive and executive chairman of electronic design software company Synopsys, was named as Nvidia's first-ever independent board chairman.

Fourteen Days from Exposure to Resignation

The sequence that ended Huang's tenure began on October 29, when The New York Times reported that U.S. intelligence agencies had investigated Alice Huang — known in documents as Huang Le — an executive at the Singapore-based cloud services company Megaspeed International, for her close personal relationship with Huang. Alice Huang is a Chinese citizen and is not related to Jensen Huang. U.S. officials concluded she had been recruited by China's Ministry of State Security to gather intelligence on AI semiconductor technology and the American companies developing it.

Fortune's investigation into Megaspeed showed that the company had facilitated chip purchases worth approximately $7.5 billion, some of which may have circumvented U.S. export controls on advanced semiconductors. The company had served as a conduit for Nvidia GPUs reaching customers in Southeast Asia and potentially beyond. Jensen Huang had separately advocated for relaxing U.S. export restrictions on advanced AI chips — a policy position that congressional investigators now viewed in a different light.

On November 5, three Republican committee chairs sent a letter requesting a closed-door briefing with Huang. The board launched a formal investigation on November 8. That same day, Huang sent an internal company email acknowledging infidelity. Nvidia's board issued a statement declaring that "today's news will not slow Nvidia" and that Huang was "committed to continuing to lead Nvidia as CEO without interruption."

A Second Affair Accelerated Huang's Departure

That commitment lasted three days. On November 11, The New York Times reported a second alleged affair, this one involving Kimberly Powell, a Nvidia vice president overseeing the company's healthcare division. Powell, 48, had been with Nvidia for 18 years and reported directly to Huang. Five former employees cited by the Times described an incident at a hotel during Nvidia's GTC developer conference in March 2026. Congressional committee chairs escalated their demands, threatening subpoenas.

Nvidia shares fell approximately 8 percent in after-hours trading on November 11. By November 12, Huang had resigned. Nvidia shares had fallen more than 30 percent from their October 6 record close, erasing roughly $1.7 trillion in market capitalization since the peak the company set on October 6. The Rosen Law Firm filed a class-action securities lawsuit covering the period from October 9, 2025 to November 8, 2026, alleging that investors had been misled during that period.

The Ministry of State Security and the AI Chip Export War

Nvidia occupies a singular position in the global AI supply chain. Its H100 and Blackwell-series GPUs are the dominant hardware platform for training and running large artificial intelligence models, and no competitor has demonstrated comparable scale or software integration at the speed at which Nvidia currently ships.

China's Ministry of State Security, founded in 1983 and operating under expanded authority since Xi Jinping consolidated power in 2012, runs a broad portfolio of human and technical intelligence operations targeting advanced technology. Researchers have documented the agency's increasing use of AI tools to accelerate its collection activities against American semiconductor and AI companies.

Congressional Republicans have framed the affair not merely as a personal scandal but as a potential national security failure, arguing that a close relationship between the chief executive of the world's most important AI chip company and an individual U.S. officials assessed to be a foreign intelligence asset raised questions that demanded direct testimony. Whether Huang's advocacy for relaxed export controls was influenced by his relationship with Alice Huang is a question the board investigation has not publicly resolved.

A Succession Vacuum Years in the Making

Bloomberg reported in January 2026 that Nvidia had no clear successor to Huang, an unusual position for a company of its scale and strategic importance. At the GTC developer conference in March 2026, Huang told an interviewer that he did not believe in succession plans, a position that now carries different weight than it did when the company appeared untouchable.

The organization Nvidia built reflected Huang's approach to leadership. Product roadmaps, customer relationships, and architecture decisions flowed through his judgment in ways that made the company extraordinarily effective and left its next moves dependent on a single person who had not prepared anyone to take his place.

Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon has written that "Jensen Huang is Nvidia, and Nvidia is Jensen Huang" — an assessment intended as analysis of corporate strength that now reads equally as a warning about succession risk. The same concentration of authority that made Nvidia dominant has become its most visible governance vulnerability.

The leading internal candidates are Ian Buck, Nvidia's vice president of accelerated computing and the architect of CUDA, the software platform that became the foundation of the modern AI hardware industry; and Bryan Catanzaro, vice president of applied deep learning research. Neither has previously operated a public company.

Colette Kress is viewed as a credible short-term stabilizer. She is the executive who told Wall Street analysts that Nvidia had "visibility to half a trillion dollars in Blackwell and Rubin revenue from the start of this year through the end of calendar year 2026," a forecast that set expectations for one of the most ambitious product cycles in semiconductor history. Her limitations as a permanent choice center on her lack of engineering background and product-leadership experience in a company whose competitive advantage is inseparable from its technical decisions.

External candidates mentioned in reports include Lisa Su, the chief executive of Advanced Micro Devices; Rene Haas, the chief executive of Arm Holdings; Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive of Google; Thomas Kurian, the chief executive of Google Cloud; and Matt Garman, the chief executive of Amazon Web Services. Each brings complications: recruiting a sitting chief executive from a competitor or key partner would reshape the competitive landscape and trigger retention concerns at the acquired executive's former company.

A Five-Hundred-Billion-Dollar Pipeline and an Uncertain Hand-Off

Nvidia is mid-cycle on its Blackwell GPU generation, the product line Kress cited in that half-trillion-dollar revenue forecast, with the follow-on Vera Rubin architecture already on the roadmap. Customers have committed purchasing plans running through 2027 and beyond, and hyperscalers have announced capital expenditure plans in the hundreds of billions of dollars built around Nvidia's future product schedules.

The company's Q3 FY2027 earnings call is scheduled for November 17, five days away. It will be Kress's first as the person nominally in charge of Nvidia — a moment she will navigate with no successor named, a securities class action recently filed, and an active congressional investigation into the company's former chief executive.

The governance restructuring accompanying the leadership change is itself notable. Nvidia's board had previously operated without an independent chairman — a structure common in Silicon Valley founder-led companies but increasingly scrutinized by institutional shareholders. The appointment of Harvey C. Jones to that role represents the board's most significant acknowledgment that the company's governance model has not kept pace with its size, its strategic importance, or the risks that have now materialized.

How quickly the board can identify and install a permanent chief executive will determine whether the company can maintain the customer confidence and product discipline that made Nvidia the most consequential technology company of the AI era.