Jensen Huang Resigns as NVIDIA CEO After 33 Years — Colette Kress Takes Over

 

The man who built the company at the center of the AI boom is out. NVIDIA announced on Thursday, November 12, that co-founder Jensen Huang has resigned as president, chief executive officer and a member of the board, effective immediately — ending a 33-year run at the top.

What happened

NVIDIA's board accepted Huang's resignation on Wednesday, November 11, according to a Form 8-K filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, and announced the change the next day. Chief financial officer Colette Kress has agreed to serve as interim CEO while keeping her CFO role, and the board has begun a search for a permanent chief executive, considering internal and external candidates. The board also appointed director Harvey C. Jones as its first-ever chair. NVIDIA's official statement gave no reason for the resignation. Press reports, including the Wall Street Journal, link the exit to revelations about Huang's personal life; the Associated Press noted it could not independently confirm the reported relationships.

Why it matters

Huang co-founded NVIDIA in 1993 and turned a maker of graphics chips for gamers into the company whose hardware powers nearly all frontier AI training. NVIDIA's GPUs sit at the heart of the AI boom — every major lab, includingOpenAI, Google and Anthropic, trains its models on them — and the company was only days ago in the headlines for GR00T 2, its new robot-training model. That is why a sudden leadership change at NVIDIA is not just a corporate story; it is an AI story. The company said its products and customer commitments continue without interruption, and its third-quarter results are still scheduled for Tuesday, November 17, as planned.

Who is running NVIDIA now

Kress has been NVIDIA's CFO since September 2013, after finance roles at Cisco, Microsoft and Texas Instruments, and she steered the company's finances through its transformation into an AI  giant. In a memo to staff, she praised Huang and said she would continue building on the extraordinary foundation Jensen created over the last 33 years. The open question now is who leads NVIDIA next — and whether the board looks inside the company or brings in an outsider to run the world's most important AI chipmaker.

Our take

Thirty-three years is an extraordinary run, and Huang's exit marks the end of an era for the company that made modern AI possible. The hardware roadmap, the earnings call on November 17 and the permanent CEO search will tell us how much actually changes. For now, the AI boom's engine has a new driver — and the whole industry will be watching the road ahead.