Nvidia’s board announced on 12 November that Jensen Huang had resigned as president, chief executive and a member of the board, with immediate effect. In an 8-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the company says that on 11 November the board accepted the resignation of Jen-Hsun Huang.

Colette Kress, 59, executive vice president and chief financial officer since September 2013, was appointed interim chief executive. She keeps the finance job until a permanent successor is chosen. The board says it will look at candidates inside and outside the company. Before Nvidia, Kress spent nearly 25 years in finance roles, including at Cisco and Microsoft. Third-quarter results for fiscal 2027 remain set for Tuesday, 17 November, at 1:20 p.m. Pacific time, with the earnings call at 2:00 p.m.

Harvey C. Jones, 73, a director since 1993, was named the board’s first chair. Since 2004 he has been managing partner of Square Wave Ventures, a private family office, and he was chief executive and executive chairman of Synopsys. Jones said the board has full confidence in Kress and the leadership team, and that operations, customer commitments and the product roadmap should continue without interruption. Kress said she would build on the “extraordinary foundation” Jensen created over the past 33 years.

Before the announcement, Reuters reported, citing a source familiar with the matter, that the board was meeting on Wednesday to decide whether to remove Huang, amid reports of two extramarital affairs. Nvidia had not commented to Reuters at that point. The company’s filings describe a resignation that was accepted, not a dismissal, and the reports about his private life are not a finding of this article.

In the same piece, analysts were discussing who might follow in the long run, not who had already been appointed. Josh Gilbert of eToro said Kress could steady the market in the short term and that, for the permanent job, the board might want an engineer such as Ian Buck — at Nvidia since 2004, tied to the CUDA platform and to the company’s artificial-intelligence products for large data centres. Shay Boloor of Futurum Equities also called Buck the strongest long-term internal candidate. A banker told Reuters that Rene Haas, the chief executive of Arm and a former Nvidia executive, would make sense as an outside name. That day’s speculation also included the 32-year veteran Jeff Fisher and one of Huang’s two children, both of whom are executives at the company. Semafor had reported that some directors favoured Kress as interim chief if Huang left.

Reuters wrote, in the 12 November piece, that fear of a replacement had contributed that week to a selloff of about $600 billion in market value and that Nvidia was then the world’s second-most valuable company. The figure belongs to that account.

The photograph shows the sign at the entrance to Nvidia’s campus on Scott Boulevard in Santa Clara, California. It is not the board meeting and it does not show Huang. Credit: Will Buckner, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

Source: Who could be next CEO at Nvidia after 'rockstar' Jensen Huang?, Dawn / Reuters.