Jensen Huang resigned as president and CEO of Nvidia on Wednesday following revelations of a romantic affair with an alleged Chinese spy. Nvidia's board accepted his resignation and named CFO and executive vice president Colette Kress as interim CEO. Kress will retain her CFO role while leading the company until a permanent successor is found.
Nvidia shares fell nearly 12% in early trading Thursday. Since Friday, the stock dropped as much as 19%, erasing over $855 billion in market value.
Huang founded Nvidia in 1993 and built it into the dominant supplier of GPUs for AI infrastructure. Under his leadership, the company's stock rose more than 1,450% before ChatGPT launched, reaching $243 per share last month. Revenue surged over 1,500% to $96.22 billion in the company's second quarter from $5.93 billion in Q3 2023. Profits increased nearly 88 times to $59.69 billion in July 2026 from $680 million in October 2023.
Beyond chip sales, Huang directed Nvidia's sprawling investment strategy. As of Q2, the company held $99 billion in investments and $25 billion in commitments. Nvidia invested $2 billion in CoreWeave in January and $2 billion in Nebius in March. The chipmaker put $30 billion into OpenAI and $10 billion into Anthropic. It pledged up to $105 billion in credit guarantees for an OpenAI data center campus in Ohio and backed other infrastructure plays.
Huang held only 3.5% of Nvidia's shares and lacked supervoting rights. Harvey C. Jones, a managing partner of Square Wave Ventures and former CEO of Synopsys, was appointed as Nvidia's first board chair. Jones has served on Nvidia's board since 1993.
Nvidia reports earnings Tuesday. CoreWeave shares fell 9% Thursday while Nebius dropped 16%.