Jensen Huang resigns as NVIDIA CEO after foreign-intelligence probe; CFO Colette Kress named interim CEO

NVIDIA's co-founder and only CEO in its history has left the company effective immediately. Per the board's announcement, Jensen Huang resigned as president, CEO and director after an independent investigation connected to allegations of a foreign intelligence effort targeting him. Colette Kress, the CFO who has steered NVIDIA's finances through the AI boom, is now interim CEO and keeps her CFO duties. Board member Harvey C. Jones becomes the first independent board chair, a governance change on its own.

Operationally, NVIDIA is signalling continuity. Q3 fiscal 2027 earnings stay on the calendar for November 17. The company says chip manufacturing, partner commitments and its NIM inference microservice roadmap are unaffected. That earnings call is now the first real test of the interim team: investors will want guidance on Blackwell-successor ramps and any customer reaction.

The resignation lands in an unusually busy week for NVIDIA. It is a cornerstone investor in Anthropic's IPO private placement. Its reported $12.9B Hugging Face deal is pending. It also just joined the new SGLang Consortium. Each of those relationships was closely associated with Huang personally, so they now face questions about who champions them inside the company.

Community reaction is split. Threads on r/nvidia debate whether this was a resignation or a termination. A self-described NVIDIA senior director said he would resign in solidarity. Commentators also point to Huang's roughly 60 direct reports and the lack of a visible succession plan. Wired reports that employees are petitioning for his return. The national-security angle, meaning the alleged Chinese intelligence link and possible technology-transfer risk, is drawing more scrutiny than the personal dimension. Watch for a permanent CEO search timeline, any regulatory or congressional follow-up, and whether customers pause commitments before the earnings call.