Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Resigns Immediately: Interim Leader Colette Kress and Top Successors

Short answer: Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia’s President, Chief Executive Officer, and board member effective immediately on November 12, 2026, leaving no pre-named permanent heir ready to replace him. The company’s board appointed longtime Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress as Interim CEO while launching a formal search across both internal and external candidates. Nvidia shares dropped roughly 10% in premarket trading as directors also named Harvey C. Jones as the company’s first independent Chair of the Board.

1. What Nvidia announced on November 12

For more than three decades since co-founding Nvidia in 1993, Jensen Huang shaped every product cycle, investor pitch, and software partnership at the Santa Clara chipmaker. On Thursday, November 12, 2026, that era ended without a gradual handoff period.

Nvidia confirmed that Huang stepped down immediately from all three positions: CEO, President, and director on the board. Unlike many founder transitions where a departing chief executive remains executive chair or stays as an advisor, Huang kept no seat on Nvidia’s board.

Even after reassuring investors that product roadmaps and foundry deliveries will continue without interruption, Nvidia’s stock (NVDA) slid about 10% in premarket trading. Market reaction showed how heavily Wall Street treated Huang himself as part of Nvidia’s valuation.

2. Why Huang stepped down right now

Huang’s exit followed days of escalating legal, political, and boardroom pressure rather than routine retirement timing.

Earlier this week, the crisis widened rapidly after coverage exposed the initial intelligence unmasking of Jensen Huang’s ties to Alice Huang, an executive at Singaporean data-center firm Megaspeed identified by US counterintelligence authorities as a suspected Chinese intelligence operative. Days later, stocks fell and shareholder lawsuits multiplied after an FBI counterintelligence probe confirmed by President Trump moved the story from tabloid scrutiny to federal national security oversight.

Reporting from The Guardian and Fortune adds that Nvidia’s board investigation examined not only the undisclosed tie to Alice Huang, but also a second extramarital relationship involving an internal company executive. Together, those conduct findings made staying on as chief executive of a strategically sensitive semiconductor supplier untenable.

3. Who is running Nvidia right now: Colette Kress and Harvey C. Jones

To steady operations immediately after Huang walked out, directors elevated two familiar veterans rather than rushing a permanent pick.

Colette Kress has served as Nvidia’s Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer since 2013. Over the past 13 years, she managed Nvidia’s financial scaling from a gaming graphics maker into the central hardware supplier for global artificial intelligence infrastructure. She will carry both the Interim CEO and CFO titles while the search committee meets.

Meanwhile, appointing Harvey C. Jones as independent Board Chair signals an effort to satisfy institutional investors demanding stronger oversight. Jones is a seasoned semiconductor executive, venture investor, and former CEO of Synopsys who already understands chip design workflows and corporate governance standards.

4. Top internal candidates to replace Jensen Huang

Because Nvidia operated with a remarkably flat management structure reporting directly into Huang, the company never groomed a single public second-in-command. Still, market analysts and technology reporters point quickly toward three insiders who run Nvidia’s biggest operating engines:

1. Colette Kress (Interim CEO & CFO): Giving Kress the permanent job would offer stability to Wall Street analysts, cloud buyers, and Taiwan manufacturing partners who already trust her numbers. The drawback is technical pedigree: investors often prefer a deep engineering or systems leader at the helm of a frontier hardware company.
2. Ian Buck (Hyperscale AI & CUDA Leader): Buck is widely known across Silicon Valley as the key architect behind CUDA, the programming layer that makes Nvidia GPUs nearly impossible for AI labs to swap out for rival hardware. Choosing Buck would reassure engineers that Nvidia’s software moat comes first.
3. Jay Puri (Longtime Field Operations Chief): Having spent years running worldwide field operations and enterprise partnerships before shifting into an advisory role, Puri knows nearly every major hyperscaler and sovereign buyer ordering Nvidia clusters. His familiarity with customer demand rivals anyone inside Santa Clara.

5. Why external stars like Lisa Su and Johny Srouji keep coming up

Because Nvidia now carries trillion-dollar stakes, its board explicitly committed to reviewing outside executives alongside insiders. Financial commentary quickly surfaced two prominent external names:

• Lisa Su (CEO of AMD): Su transformed Advanced Micro Devices from a struggling chipmaker into a serious server CPU and AI accelerator competitor. Her hardware credentials, Wall Street credibility, and operational discipline match Nvidia’s scale cleanly, though pulling a sitting chief executive out of a fierce rival would trigger huge contractual barriers and competitive friction.
• Johny Srouji (Apple Hardware Technologies Chief): Srouji built Apple’s in-house silicon division from the ground up, proving he can manage bleeding-edge chip teams at global volume. However, running an internal chip team inside Apple differs sharply from selling server platforms to cloud competitors and managing Washington export politics.

Hiring any outsider also carries timing risk. An external CEO needs months to learn Nvidia’s supply chain schedules with TSMC, rack-scale NVLink systems, and export-control compliance pressures at a moment when unauthorized chip diversion and high-value Nvidia data center GPU cargo thefts remain top policy headaches.

6. What investors and AI customers should watch next

Nvidia’s immediate test is whether hyperscale buyers such as Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon keep signing multi-billion-dollar rack orders cleanly under Colette Kress without pausing for governance clarity.

The board search committee now faces a clear trade-off: promote an insider like Kress, Ian Buck, or Jay Puri to preserve Nvidia’s internal speed and CUDA culture, or recruit an external heavyweight like Lisa Su or Johny Srouji to prove a clean governance break from the Huang era. Until a permanent CEO takes the seat, expect Nvidia’s stock and succession rumors to move sharply on every board update.

Sources to check yourself

• NVIDIA Newsroom: Official November 12, 2026 statement confirming Jensen Huang’s immediate resignation, Colette Kress’s appointment as Interim CEO, and Harvey C. Jones’s selection as independent Chair.
• The Guardian: Reporting on the internal board conduct probe covering undisclosed relationships and Huang’s immediate exit.
• Fortune: Analyst breakdown of Nvidia’s lack of a pre-named successor and leading internal vs. external replacements.
• CNN Business: Premarket share drop tracking (~10%) and continuity assurances to data-center customers.