Nvidia says Jensen Huang has resigned as CEO

Nvidia said Kress was “committed to building on the extraordinary foundation Jensen created over the last 33 years.” The company also appointed board member Harvey Jones, former CEO of Synopsys, as its first executive chairman.

Nvidia shares fell 10% in premarket trading after the announcement, extending losses since the scandal emerged. Huang told staff in a memo earlier this week that he had been unfaithful to his wife. The New York Times reported in late October that he had a “close relationship” with Alice Huang, an executive at Singapore-based cloud provider Megaspeed, an Nvidia client. The Times also reported that US officials believed Alice Huang had been recruited to gather information about Nvidia for the Chinese government, and that authorities scrutinized Megaspeed over suspicions it helped China obtain restricted Nvidia chips. On Wednesday, the newspaper reported, citing anonymous sources, that Huang had an affair with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of healthcare.

Huang cofounded Nvidia in 1993 and had led it since its inception. The company grew from a graphics card maker known for video games into the leading supplier of chips powering the AI boom. Huang, 63, has played a central role in product strategy and built long-standing ties with customers, manufacturing partners and government officials, raising questions about Nvidia’s future without him.

Nvidia’s share price rose from around $2 a decade ago to a peak of $240 in October, an increase of more than 10,000%. The company’s $4.2 trillion market capitalization made it the world’s second-most valuable company, after Alphabet, Google’s parent. Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index put Huang’s fortune at $145 billion, making him the 13th-richest person in the world.