Jensen Huang has resigned as Nvidia’s president and chief executive, and has also left the board, effective immediately. Chief financial officer Colette Kress takes over as interim CEO while keeping her finance role.
Nvidia says its operations, customer commitments and product roadmap should continue without interruption. The company’s third-quarter results are still due on Tuesday, 17 November, with the earnings call at 2 p.m. Pacific time.
The board also created a post it never had: Harvey C. Jones is its first-ever chair. Jones has been an entrepreneur, executive and venture investor for more than 30 years and was previously chief executive and executive chairman of Synopsys. A search for a permanent CEO is under way, and the board says insiders and outsiders are both in the running.
Kress joined Nvidia in September 2013 and has run its finance organisation since. Her earlier career, almost 25 years of it, was in finance at tech firms that include Cisco and Microsoft. In Nvidia’s announcement, she thanks Huang for the foundation he built over 33 years and says her focus stays on customers, partners, developers and shareholders.
The exit follows a week in which Nvidia’s board had already stepped in. Its independent directors, in a statement on 10 November, said they had retained Joon H. Kim, a former acting US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and his firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz for an independent investigation. Our earlier report on that probe has the background, which the independent directors had announced on the Sunday before.
Nvidia’s release gives no reason for the resignation and no findings from the investigation, and the board names no date for choosing a permanent CEO. Jones’s quote says only that the board has full confidence in Kress and in an experienced leadership team that has driven the company’s strategy and product roadmap.
For buyers of GeForce cards and AI hardware, the near-term signal is continuity: the company is keeping its reporting date and its customer commitments. Who gets the job permanently is the open question, and the 17 November call will be the first time Kress, rather than Huang, takes investors through the numbers.
