Nvidia’s board said on Thursday that Jensen Huang has resigned as president, chief executive and a director, effective immediately, ending 33 years as head of the company he co-founded in 1993. CFO Colette Kress will serve as interim CEO while keeping her finance role, and the board has started a search for a permanent successor that will cover internal and external candidates. Harvey Jones, a former CEO and executive chairman of Synopsys, was appointed the board’s first-ever chair. Nvidia’s announcement did not give a reason for the resignation.
The move comes four days after the board opened an independent investigation into reports that Huang had been targeted by Chinese intelligence, a review it had said he would remain CEO through. What also came to light, and accepted by Huang, were his affairs with multiple women, including the one suspected as Chinese spy and a senior woman executive from within Nvidia.
On Tuesday, the independent directors retained former acting US Attorney Joon Kim to lead it. On Wednesday, The New York Times reported a second relationship, with a vice president who reports to Huang, and The Wall Street Journal reported that the board was preparing to remove him. The board met that evening.
Nvidia shares fell as much as 10% in premarket trading on Thursday, and the company has lost roughly $1 trillion in market value since the Times first reported on October 29 that Huang had a close relationship with a suspected Chinese spy, according to Axios. Six analysts downgraded the stock between Wednesday night and Thursday morning. Bernstein cut its price target to $200 from $400, and Baird cut its target to $200 from $500. Before the resignation, analyst Dan Ives put Nvidia’s value at $300 a share with Huang and $225 without him. US lawmakers had also called for Huang’s resignation.
Kress has been CFO since September 2013 and previously spent nearly 25 years in finance roles at Cisco and Microsoft. Jones said the board expects operations, customer commitments and the product roadmap to continue without interruption. Nvidia will report third-quarter results on Tuesday, November 17, as scheduled, with the call at 2 p.m. PT, which will be Kress’s first as interim CEO. The date also falls a day before Anthropic’s IPO prices, in which Nvidia is among the companies committed to a $26 billion private placement.