Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Resigns Amid Spy Scandal as Shares Plunge

Jensen Huang resigns as president and chief executive of Nvidia with immediate effect, the company announced on Thursday, 12 November 2026, ending a 33-year run at the chipmaker he co-founded and built into the world’s most valuable company. The departure sent Nvidia shares plunging and threw the future of the artificial intelligence industry’s dominant chip supplier into uncertainty.

FAKTA

• Jensen Huang resigned as president, chief executive and a member of Nvidia’s board, effective immediately on Thursday, 12 November 2026.
• Chief financial officer Colette Kress will serve as interim chief executive while the board searches for a permanent successor.
• Board member Harvey C. Jones, the former chief executive of Synopsys, was appointed as Nvidia’s first-ever chairman of the board.
• Nvidia shares fell more than 10 per cent in premarket trading and as much as 14 per cent after the opening bell, before paring some of the losses.
• The roughly $4 trillion chipmaker has shed about $600 billion in stock market value this week since the board announced its investigation, USA Today reported.
• Nvidia is due to report third-quarter results on 17 November, as scheduled.

Shares plunge as markets weigh succession

Nvidia shares fell more than 10 per cent in premarket trading on Thursday and dropped as much as 14 per cent after the opening bell, before recovering some ground to trade around 5 per cent lower later in the day, market reports showed. The sell-off weighed on the broader market and on other artificial intelligence stocks.

Huang, 63, is Nvidia’s co-founder and its fourth-largest investor, with a stake of about 3.6 per cent, and there is no obvious successor. He had dozens of direct reports and no clear succession plan, a concern for investors who worry the $4 trillion firm could struggle without the leader who turned it into the engine of the AI boom.

Reuters reported that Huang’s exit “plunges the $4 trillion company into uncertainty and threatens to disrupt an AI ecosystem that he helped bankroll by pouring Nvidia’s swelling cash pile back into cloud providers, suppliers and the industry’s biggest labs.” Investor sentiment towards AI stocks was already shaky, with soaring cash burn and rising debt at cash-rich tech giants fuelling doubts over whether the AI boom will pay off.

Jensen Huang resigns after weeks of turmoil

The resignation follows weeks of mounting scrutiny over Huang’s personal life. On 29 October, The New York Times reported that Huang had developed a close relationship with Alice Huang, 49, a former executive at Singapore-based cloud company Megaspeed, whom US intelligence officials have concluded was a Chinese intelligence asset. The two are not related. They have been photographed together in Taiwan, Singapore and California. Beijing has denied that Alice Huang is a spy.

Washington has also investigated Megaspeed, a coveted official Nvidia cloud partner with priority access to its chips, over suspicions it helped China obtain advanced AI chips restricted under US export controls, according to media reports.

Huang admitted the affair at the weekend. On 8 November, Nvidia’s board announced that independent directors, assisted by outside legal counsel, would investigate whether Huang had been targeted by a foreign intelligence operation. The board said at the time that it had no reason to believe US national security or Nvidia’s confidential information had been compromised.

The controversy escalated on Wednesday, when The New York Times reported that Huang had also had an affair with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of healthcare, who reported to him. The board met late on Wednesday to discuss the company’s future after The Wall Street Journal reported that directors were preparing to remove him, sending the shares down about 8 per cent in after-hours trading.

Nvidia announced the resignation on Thursday morning. The board’s statement gave no reason for the departure, and the company has not said whether the reports about Huang’s personal life were connected to it.

Trump suggests Tim Cook as successor

US President Donald Trump suggested on Thursday that former Apple chief executive Tim Cook should replace Huang. “NOW THAT Nvidia CEO JENSEN HUANG, who has done a fantastic job, has resigned, there is only one man to take his place — TIM COOK of Apple,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, Reuters reported.

Cook stepped down as Apple’s chief executive in September after a 15-year stint and is now the iPhone maker’s executive chairman. Apple and Cook did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

What happens next

Kress will lead Nvidia as interim chief executive while the board searches for a permanent successor, and Jones takes over as the board’s first chairman. Nvidia said it will report third-quarter results on 17 November as scheduled and expects its operations to proceed without interruption.

The departure could also have far-reaching consequences for US chip export policy, given Huang’s push to preserve access to the Chinese market and his close ties with Trump, who said on Sunday that Huang had “done an amazing job for our country” and that the Nvidia chief had told him he did not know the woman he had an affair with was a spy.

Jensen Huang Resigns as Nvidia CEO Amid Spy Scandal as Shares Plunge is published in our Business coverage.