The announcement, in plain terms
On 12 November 2026 the board of NVIDIA, the Nasdaq-listed chipmaker that trades as NVDA, told the world that Jensen Huang was no longer running the company. According to the board’s statement, Huang resigned as President, as Chief Executive Officer and as a director, all with immediate effect. A founder who had led the business for 33 years, from a start-up with a graphics idea to the reference supplier of the AI era, left every formal role in a single sentence.
The same statement laid out who holds the keys now. Colette Kress, the Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, has agreed to serve as Interim CEO and will keep her finance job until a permanent chief executive is chosen. Harvey C. Jones becomes Chair of the Board, a title the company says it has never had before. The board has opened a search for a permanent CEO and says it will look at internal and external candidates alike.
Just as telling is what did not move. NVIDIA said its third-quarter fiscal 2027 results will still be released on Tuesday 17 November at about 1:20 p.m. Pacific time, with the earnings call at 2 p.m. Pacific, “as previously scheduled.” In other words, the new leadership faces Wall Street within five days of taking over.
This report is written by the Vemetto Editorial Team. It is built first on NVIDIA’s own statement and its filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Press reporting about the circumstances is kept in a separate, clearly labelled section, with every claim tied to the outlet that published it.
Reading the SEC filing
When a U.S.-listed company loses or appoints a top officer, it has to tell investors through a Form 8-K filed with the SEC. NVIDIA’s filing is dated 12 November 2026 and lists 11 November as the date of the earliest event reported. Put simply, the board accepted the resignation on Wednesday; the public learned of it on Thursday morning.
The filing uses Huang’s legal name, Jen-Hsun Huang, and records that the board accepted his resignation as President, CEO and board member. It gives Kress’s age as 59, notes she has been CFO since 2013 and confirms she stays in that role while serving as interim chief. Harvey C. Jones, 73, was named Chair on 11 November; the filing says he has sat on the board since 1993 and has been Managing Partner of Square Wave Ventures, a private family office, since 2004.
Two small details stand out. The document is signed by Kress herself, under the triple title of Interim Chief Executive Officer, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. And it attaches the press release as Exhibit 99.1 but offers no reason for the departure and no description of any separation terms. That silence is normal for an 8-K, which records what happened rather than why.
The distinction matters for readers. A press release is a communication; an 8-K is a legal disclosure that carries liability if it misleads investors. On the core facts of who left, who stepped in and when, both documents say exactly the same thing, which is why we treat them as the firm ground of this story.
Colette Kress, the finance chief now in charge
Kress arrived at NVIDIA in September 2013. The company’s statement credits her with nearly 25 years in finance roles at technology groups before that, including Cisco and Microsoft. Her NVIDIA tenure covers almost the entire transformation from a gaming-graphics specialist into the dominant seller of the processors and systems that train and run modern AI models.
In a company of this scale the CFO is much more than the person who signs off on the accounts. She is the voice investors hear every quarter, explaining guidance, supply commitments and capital returns. Choosing her as interim leader is therefore a message aimed squarely at markets: the executive analysts already know from every earnings call is the one now running the business.
The official statement quotes Kress saying that “NVIDIA’s strength has always come from its people” and that she is committed to building on “the extraordinary foundation Jensen created over the last 33 years.” Jones, in the same release, said the board “has full confidence in Colette and the leadership team” and expects operations, customer commitments and the product roadmap “to continue without interruption.”
Holding the CEO and CFO jobs at once is demanding, and boards rarely treat it as more than a bridge. One role is about vision, products and the largest relationships; the other is about controls, reporting and discipline. NVIDIA has not said how long the search will take.
Why the first-ever board chair matters
Naming a Chair can look like housekeeping. Here it may be the most structural change in the announcement. Founder-led technology companies often concentrate authority in one person, with a lead independent director coordinating the outside board members. By creating the Chair role now, NVIDIA separates oversight of management from management itself.
Jones is hardly an outsider. He joined the board in 1993, when the company was barely a year old, and the release describes three decades as an entrepreneur, technology executive and venture investor, including service as Chief Executive Officer and Executive Chairman of Synopsys, the chip-design software company. Picking a veteran who knows the company’s history signals a preference for continuity and inside knowledge at a fragile moment.
Governance specialists generally see a separate chair as a way to strengthen accountability. Whether NVIDIA keeps the split once a permanent CEO is in place is one of the questions large shareholders are likely to watch.
Who is Jensen Huang?
Huang was born in Taiwan in 1963, moved to the United States as a child, studied electrical engineering at Oregon State University and later earned a master’s degree at Stanford. In 1993 he co-founded NVIDIA with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem around a narrow bet: dedicated chips that would make 3D graphics on personal computers fast enough for games.
That bet grew into the graphics processing unit, or GPU. The pivotal turn came in 2006 with CUDA, a programming platform that let scientists put the thousands of small cores inside a GPU to work on general calculations in parallel. It looked like an expensive detour at the time. A few years later, when deep learning took off, researchers found that NVIDIA hardware and software were the quickest path to training neural networks.
The generative-AI boom turned that head start into one of the most valuable franchises in corporate history. CNBC, reporting on the day of the resignation, described NVIDIA as a roughly $4 trillion company. Along the way Huang, in his trademark black leather jacket, became a fixture on conference stages and something like a spokesman for the AI industry as a whole.
Reuters reports that Huang, 63, is NVIDIA’s fourth-largest shareholder with a stake of about 3.61%. Leaving management and the board does not by itself change that holding; the company’s statement says nothing about his shares, and any change would appear in later ownership disclosures.
What the press has reported about the background
Editor’s note: nothing in this section appears in NVIDIA’s statement or its SEC filing. It summarises what named news organisations have reported. Several points are allegations that no court or public authority has confirmed, and we present them as reporting, not as established fact.
According to the Associated Press, ABC News and Reuters, the resignation followed days of reports about an extramarital relationship between Huang and a Chinese businesswoman, a former executive of a company called Megaspeed International, whom U.S. officials reportedly suspect of working for Chinese intelligence. Those reports stress that she is not related to Huang despite the shared surname.
ABC reported that Huang acknowledged the relationship in a memo to staff, apologised, and said he was committed to protecting the company and supporting U.S. national security. China’s foreign ministry rejected the espionage claims, calling them groundless, according to ABC Australia. Before the resignation, NVIDIA’s board posted its own statement announcing an independent investigation overseen by a committee of independent directors with outside counsel; it said the board had “no reason to believe” that national security or NVIDIA secrets had been compromised.
Further reports, which several outlets attributed to The New York Times, described a second relationship with an NVIDIA employee who reported to Huang. The AP says those reports emerged late on Wednesday 11 November, the same day the 8-K says the board accepted his resignation. Reuters, citing CNBC, added that Huang had agreed to testify before Congress before the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday.
It is worth restating the boundaries. NVIDIA’s official announcement gives no reason for the resignation. No one has been charged or convicted of anything in connection with these reports, and no U.S. agency had published findings at the time of writing. Everything beyond the company’s documents is, for now, journalism based on sources.
The market reaction, with the caveats
Share prices on a day like this move by the minute, so we give figures with their source and time. Yahoo Finance’s historical data show NVIDIA closed at $173.73 on Wednesday 11 November. On Thursday the stock touched an intraday low of $148.80, roughly 14% below that close, then recovered to trade around $165, about 5% lower, at around 1 p.m. New York time.
That pattern matches CoinDesk’s account of a fall of “as much as 14%” followed by a partial rebound, and Reuters’ description of a steep early slide that later narrowed. The Los Angeles Times noted that, at the low, the shares were down by as much as 19% from the previous Friday. Estimates of how much market value was erased differ widely depending on when they were taken, so we do not adopt a single figure.
The New York session was still open when this article was prepared, which means the official closing price for 12 November may differ from the numbers above. Anyone who needs an exact price for an investment decision should check exchange data or a reliable financial platform directly rather than screenshots circulating on social media.
The swing is easier to read as a repricing of leadership risk than of earnings. Investors were not recalculating a year of profits in an afternoon; they were asking what happens to strategy, government relationships and the largest customer accounts without the founder. The partial rebound suggests that, for now, they do not expect demand for NVIDIA’s products to change overnight.
The road ahead: three dates and a search
The first checkpoint is the 17 November results. Analysts would normally focus on data-centre demand, margins and next-quarter guidance. This time they will also want to know who is steering the company and how relationships Huang handled personally will be managed. Kress usually presents the numbers on these calls; this time she will answer as both CFO and acting chief executive.
The second is internal. In staff emails published by CNBC and The Verge, Kress acknowledged “an extraordinarily difficult period” and announced a company meeting for employees on 18 November at 9 a.m. Pacific time. Reuters, citing CNBC, reported that she gathered NVIDIA’s executive team at headquarters on the day of the announcement.
The third, and longest, is the CEO search. NVIDIA has set no deadline. Searches at very large technology companies usually take months, and boards under pressure tend to value stability over surprise. Until then, the company says its roadmap and customer commitments continue unchanged.
Vemetto’s analysis: what this moment teaches
Succession cannot be an afterthought. Founder-run companies often postpone the succession conversation because the founder seems permanent. NVIDIA at least had an immediate answer: within a day it had an interim CEO, a new board chair and a filing on record. The harder work, choosing a permanent leader, starts now.
Governance proves itself under pressure. Creating a separate Chair in the middle of a crisis is a tacit admission that concentrating power in one seat no longer fits a company of this weight in the global economy. Institutional investors will be watching whether the change outlasts the emergency.
Readers should keep two columns. In stories like this, sensational headlines spread faster than documents. Our working rule: what the company states and files is procedural fact; what newspapers report from unnamed sources is a line of reporting to follow; anything circulating with no source at all is not worth sharing.
Timeline
- 1993 Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem found NVIDIA; Harvey Jones joins the board.
- 2006 CUDA opens graphics processors to general-purpose computing.
- 2013 Colette Kress joins as Chief Financial Officer.
- Early Nov 2026 Press reports of a relationship with a businesswoman U.S. officials reportedly suspect of links to Chinese intelligence; the board announces an independent investigation (details attributed in the press section).
- 11 Nov The board accepts the resignation and appoints Kress interim CEO and Jones Chair (per the 8-K); the AP says reports of a second relationship emerged that evening.
- 12 Nov Official statement and 8-K filing; sharp intraday swings in the stock; staff emails announce an employee meeting.
- 17 Nov Third-quarter fiscal 2027 results and earnings call.
- 18 Nov Company-wide employee meeting at 9 a.m. PT, according to Kress’s email as published by CNBC.
Open questions
We do not yet know who the permanent CEO will be or how long the search will last. We do not know what the board’s independent investigation will conclude, or whether its findings will be made public. NVIDIA has disclosed nothing about any separation arrangements for Huang or about any future role for him. And the real business impact will show up not in a single trading day but in the coming quarters and in the choices of the company’s largest customers.
We will update this report if new official documents are published, particularly after the 17 November results. In the meantime, the official links in the sources section below let you check every procedural fact in this article for yourself.
Frequently asked questions
Did Jensen Huang really resign from NVIDIA?
Yes. NVIDIA’s board announced on 12 November 2026 that Huang resigned as President, CEO and director with immediate effect, and the company’s Form 8-K states the board accepted the resignation on 11 November.
Who runs NVIDIA now?
Colette Kress, CFO since 2013, is Interim CEO and keeps her finance role until a permanent CEO is named. Harvey C. Jones chairs the board.
Why did he resign?
The official statement gives no reason. Outlets including the AP, Reuters and ABC linked the resignation to reports of extramarital relationships, one with a businesswoman U.S. officials reportedly suspect of working for China. Beijing denies the claims and nothing has been proven in court.
Were national security or NVIDIA secrets compromised?
In a statement issued before the resignation, the board said it had no reason to believe either was compromised and that an independent committee would investigate. No findings have been published.
How far did the stock fall?
Per Yahoo Finance data, NVDA fell to an intraday low of $148.80 on 12 November, about 14% below the prior close of $173.73, then traded near $165, about 5% lower, at midday. The official close may differ.
When does NVIDIA report earnings?
Tuesday 17 November 2026, at about 1:20 p.m. Pacific time, with the earnings call at 2 p.m. Pacific.
Is Huang still a shareholder?
The statement and filing do not mention his shares. Reuters says he is the fourth-largest shareholder with about 3.61%; any change would appear in later disclosures.
Sources and verification
The wording of this investigation is Vemetto’s own. Short quotations are attributed to NVIDIA’s 12 November 2026 statement or to the outlet that published them. The links below are provided so readers can verify each point directly.
- Official documents: NVIDIA newsroom — “NVIDIA Announces CEO Transition” · Investor relations copy · Form 8-K on SEC EDGAR · Board statement on the independent investigation
- Background reporting: Reuters (via Investing.com) · Associated Press · ABC News · ABC Australia
- Leadership and staff: CNBC live coverage · Kress and Jones staff emails — CNBC · The Verge
- Market data: NVDA price history — Yahoo Finance · CoinDesk · Los Angeles Times
About the images
Every image in this report is an original illustration generated for Vemetto. None depicts a real person, a real building or a real document, and none uses a company logo. No news-agency or press photographs are used.