Nvidia live updates: Jensen Huang resigns, CFO Colette Kress to serve as interim CEO

Nvidia shares opened 13 percent lower Thursday at $150.98, erasing roughly $550 billion in market value and pushing the company's valuation to about $3.65 trillion. The sell-off deepens a slide that had already cut 25 percent from the stock's early October peak, with $450 billion vanishing since reports of Huang's personal conduct first surfaced. Huang, 63, co-founded the company in 1993 and ran it as sole chief executive, building Nvidia from a graphics-chip maker for gamers into the indispensable supplier of AI accelerators that power data centers for OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft and Elon Musk's SpaceX, which has committed to using Nvidia GPUs exclusively.

The board appointed Colette Kress, a 13-year Nvidia veteran who joined as CFO in 2013 after senior finance roles at Cisco and Microsoft, as interim CEO while retaining her finance duties. Jones, former CEO and executive chairman of Synopsys, was named the board's first independent chair. In a statement, Kress pledged to continue advancing the work that made Nvidia a leader in accelerated computing and AI, emphasizing that operations, customer commitments and the product roadmap would proceed without interruption. Analyst Dan Ives described her as "more than just a CFO" and effectively a COO who was involved in every major strategic decision alongside Huang.

Huang's resignation followed a cascade of revelations. On Sunday he acknowledged being unfaithful to his wife after reports of an affair with Alice Huang, a Chinese businesswoman and former Megaspeed executive whom U.S. intelligence suspects was recruited by China's Ministry of State Security. The New York Times then reported a second relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice president for healthcare, who reported directly to Huang. The Times described witnesses recording the pair being affectionate outside a hotel during the March GTC conference, after which Nvidia security sequestered the bystander and required a nondisclosure agreement. The board launched an independent investigation led by former acting U.S. Kim and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, stating it had no reason to believe U.S. national security or Nvidia confidential information had been compromised.

The leadership vacuum arrives at a precarious moment. Nvidia reports third-quarter fiscal 2027 results Tuesday, and analysts are watching whether major customers reconsider orders now that the founder who personally shook hands on deals is gone. Morningstar's Brian Colello noted that AI purchasing decisions often rest with CEOs at hyperscalers, and the person shaking those hands is no longer there. Yet competitors and analysts alike point to Nvidia's CUDA software moat as a structural advantage that transcends any individual. The board has hired an outside search firm and will consider both internal and external candidates; names floated include Lisa Su of AMD, Rene Haas of Arm, Lip-Bu Tan of Intel and Johny Srouji of Apple. Ives predicts Kress will serve about a year before an outsider takes the permanent role, arguing the position now demands someone with a global stage given Nvidia's centrality to the world economy.