Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Resigns, CFO Colette Kress to Serve as Interim Leader

• Second extramarital relationship with Nvidia’s Vice President of Healthcare revealed

Emmanuel Addeh in Abuja

Jensen Huang, the founder who propelled Nvidia to become one of the world’s most valuable companies, resigned from his role yesterday as chief executive af-ter 33 years, CNN reported.

Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress was appointed in-terim chief executive, Nvidia’s board said, as it consid-ered internal and external candidates as a permanent replacement.

The announcement ended several days of whirlwind speculation about Huang’s future in the wake of a stunning corporate scandal.

Pressure had been mounting on Huang in recent days after reports said the 63-year-old, who is married, had an affair with a Chinese businesswoman who U.S. au-thorities suspected of spying for Beijing.

As the world grappled with  his sexual relationship with the suspected Chinese spy, another report emerged of a second extramarital relationship with Kimberly Powell, 48, Nvidia’s Vice President of Healthcare, who reported directly to him.

The Allegations

According to reports by The New York Times, five for-mer and current Nvidia employees disclosed the rela-tionship, stating that Huang and Powell were seen be-ing affectionate at a hotel in San Jose, California, dur-ing an annual developer conference.

This disclosure followed earlier scrutiny regarding Huang’s admitted extramarital affair with Alice Huang, a Singapore-based data centre executive whom U.S. intelligence officials alleged was linked to Chinese in-telligence.

“Colette has helped lead NVIDIA through a period of extraordinary growth and has a deep understanding of our business, customers, operations and financial posi-tion,” said Harvey Jones, who was also named Nvidia’s first-ever board chair in the Thursday announcement.

Jones added that the board expected “the company’s operations, customer commitments, and product roadmap to continue without interruption”.

Kress will also continue to serve in her current role as executive vice president and CFO until Nvidia finds a permanent CEO. As Nvidia’s chief financial officer of more than a decade, Kress has deep knowledge of the business and has been the most visible executive among investors and the public, next to Huang.

The leadership shakeup came days after the board said it would investigate whether Huang was the tar-get of a foreign intelligence effort amid reports of his relationship with a woman US officials believed was a Chinese spy, and shortly after the New York Times re-ported that the CEO also had an affair with an execu-tive who reported to him.

Huang on Sunday admitted to having an extramarital affair, without naming the other party, and apologised to his family and colleagues.

The exit marks a sharp fall from grace for Huang, who is largely responsible for kicking off the AI boom. The chips made by the company he founded in 1993 have become critical to the AI infrastructure, putting Nvidia at the centre of the AI buildout and thrusting Huang into President Donald Trump’s inner circle.

Nvidia shares dropped more than 10 per cent in pre-market trading on Thursday.

Nvidia called Huang’s contributions to the company “profound” and thanked him for his “immeasurable contributions to the company and the industry”.

Nvidia’s Whirlwind Week

Huang’s admission of an extramarital affair came in tandem with an announcement by the company’s board that it was investigating reports that he was the “target of a foreign intelligence effort”.

The inquiry followed reports that Huang was in a close relationship with Alice Huang, a Chinese citizen who had worked for Singapore-based tech company and Nvidia customer Megaspeed, whom US officials sus-pected to be working with Chinese intelligence.

The Financial Times reported that US officials believed the relationship was romantic in nature, the CNN re-port said.

Huang’s ouster represented a quick reversal by the Nvidia board, which initially said it had “confidence” in Huang in its Sunday statement and “no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised”.

Trump also defended Huang earlier this week, calling him an “honourable guy”.

But the board convened Wednesday night to weigh whether to oust Huang following the New York Times report about his additional affair with a company ex-ecutive.

Huang’s Influence at Nvidia

Huang transformed Nvidia into much more than a chipmaker, but also the centrepiece of the AI revolu-tion. He was early to bet that graphics processing units – chips commonly used in video game consoles – would be critical for training AI models.

Now, Nvidia offers all the pieces needed for AI compu-ting, from models catered to specific industries, like robotics and data centres, to networking technology, boosting it to become the world’s first trillion dollar company last year.

Clad in his signature leather jacket, Huang himself be-came an icon of the AI boom – drawing major crowds at the company’s conferences and other tech events. Some have viewed him with rockstar-like reverence; a woman once asked him to sign her chest during an au-tograph session at a tech conference in Taiwan, the report recalled.

Tech companies like Google have developed their own chips, in part to reduce their reliance on Nvidia. But Huang’s company is largely unmatched in the AI chips race.

“If you look at the magnitude of Nvidia’s offerings, no-body really can touch them,” Ted Mortonson, tech-nology desk sector strategist at Baird, told CNN last year.

As Nvidia’s profile has grown, so has Huang’s: His close relationship with Trump has given him influence in AI policy decisions. Trump even recently called Huang when he was in the middle of giving a talk at a confer-ence in September, which the Nvidia CEO put on speaker for the crowd to hear.

Huang had become synonymous with Nvidia, and his ouster casts one of the world’s largest and most influ-ential companies into a period of uncertainty. There’s never been an Nvidia without Huang; he told Bloom-berg in 2023 that the company “was built so that I know how to run it”.