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Jensen Huang resigns as Nvidia CEO

Felix Laurent 12 min read
Comic-style empty black leather jacket in a red diner booth with coffee and a chip sketch, server towers glowing outside Big tech

Jensen Huang has resigned as CEO of Nvidia, the company he co-founded 33 years ago. Nvidia's board announced the change on November 12, 2026. Huang also left his posts as president and board member, effective immediately.

Chief financial officer Colette Kress becomes interim CEO and keeps her finance role. Longtime director Harvey C. Jones becomes the board's first-ever chair. The board will search for a permanent CEO among internal and external candidates, with no timeline given.

What Nvidia announced

Nvidia's release did not give a reason for the resignation. The board thanked Huang in it for his "immeasurable contributions to the company and the industry" over three decades. The release made no mention of the board's investigation, which had begun four days earlier.

Jones said the board had full confidence in Kress and the leadership team. He added that he expects operations, customer commitments and the product roadmap "to continue without interruption" under her. Kress said she would build on "the extraordinary foundation Jensen created over the last 33 years" with the current team.

The announcement follows two weeks of scandal that began with a report linking Huang to a suspected Chinese spy. It closes a 33-year run that few founders in tech can match. Before looking at what comes next, we want to revisit the brightest moments of that run. This is the story of how Huang became a tech legend who changed both gaming and the AI industry.

How Jensen Huang built Nvidia and became a legend

Huang's story starts far from Silicon Valley. He was born in Taiwan in 1963 and sent to the US at nine with his older brother. Relatives enrolled the boys at Oneida Baptist Institute in rural Kentucky, which turned out to be a school for troubled teens. Huang cleaned toilets there every day.

He never hid that past. At Stanford's business school in 2024, he told students that no task is beneath him. "I've cleaned more toilets than all of you combined," he said.

Huang tells Stanford business students that no task is beneath him, because he has cleaned more toilets than all of them combined. Video: Stanford GSB

As a teenager in Oregon, Huang worked at Denny's as a dishwasher, busboy and waiter. He studied electrical engineering at Oregon State and Stanford, then worked at AMD and LSI Logic. In April 1993, at 30, he co-founded Nvidia with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem. The three planned it over meals at a Denny's in San Jose. In 2023 the chain put a plaque on that booth, calling it the booth that launched a $1 trillion company.

Huang shows 60 Minutes the Denny's booth in San Jose where he and his co-founders decided to start Nvidia. Video: 60 Minutes

The start nearly ended the company. Nvidia's first chip, the NV1, flopped in 1995. Its next design, for Sega's upcoming console, turned out to be wrong. Huang told Sega president Shoichiro Irimajiri that Nvidia could not deliver, but asked Sega to pay anyway. Irimajiri agreed to invest $5 million. Huang says the money "gave us six months to live" at a time when Nvidia had little else.

Huang tells NTU graduates how Sega's $5 million gave Nvidia six months to live after a failed console chip. Video: NVIDIA Taiwan

Nvidia spent that time on the RIVA 128. It shipped in 1997, when the company had about a month of payroll left, and sold a million units in four months. The near-death experience became company culture. For years, Nvidia's unofficial motto said the company was "thirty days from going out of business," long after it had become a giant.

In 1999 Nvidia went public and launched the GeForce 256, which it marketed as the world's first GPU. Graphics cards for PC games became its core business for the next decade. Then Huang made his biggest bet. In 2006 Nvidia introduced CUDA, a platform that let developers use GPUs for general computing. For years Wall Street saw it as a costly side project.

It paid off in 2012, when the AlexNet image recognition model was trained on two Nvidia gaming cards and kicked off the deep learning boom. Huang steered the company toward AI early. In 2016 he personally delivered the first DGX-1 AI supercomputer to OpenAI's office in San Francisco. He signed it to "Elon and the OpenAI Team" himself.

The pieces came together over the next years. The RTX line brought real-time ray tracing to games in 2018. In 2020 Nvidia closed its $7 billion purchase of Mellanox, adding the networking that ties GPUs together in data centers. The Hopper H100 arrived in 2022, months before ChatGPT, and became the chip that trained the generative AI wave.

Not every bet worked. Huang pulled out of smartphone chips in 2014, and Nvidia's own Shield handhelds stayed niche. Its Tegra chip later found a home in the Nintendo Switch. The $40 billion deal to buy Arm collapsed in 2022 under pressure from regulators.

By then Huang had become a showman as well as an engineer. When Nvidia's stock hit $100, he got the company logo tattooed on his arm. His leather jacket became a trademark, and his keynotes filled arenas. At GTC 2024 he held up Blackwell and introduced "a very, very big GPU" to the crowd. After that, Nvidia moved to a new data center chip every year.

Huang introduces Blackwell as a very, very big GPU at GTC 2024. Video: NVIDIA

Huang also became the industry's favorite meme. At GTC 2018 he told customers that "the more GPUs you buy, the more money you save" on AI computing. He has repeated the line at keynotes ever since, and fans now quote it to mock Nvidia's prices.

Huang repeats his famous line, the more you buy, the more you save, at Computex 2023. Video: NVIDIA

During the pandemic, his kitchen became a stage. In May 2020 Nvidia posted a teaser of Huang pulling the "world's largest graphics card" out of his home oven. It then streamed the GTC keynote from the same kitchen. In 2021 Nvidia admitted that parts of that year's kitchen keynote were computer-generated, which kept the joke going.

Huang takes the world's largest graphics card out of his home oven in the teaser for Nvidia's 2020 kitchen keynote. Video: NVIDIA

The jacket became a meme of its own. Fans priced each new one, including an $8,990 lizard-embossed Tom Ford he wore at GTC 2024, and compared it with the stock. At SIGGRAPH 2024 he even swapped jackets with Mark Zuckerberg on stage.

Mark Zuckerberg hands Huang a shearling jacket on stage at SIGGRAPH 2024, the start of their famous jacket swap. Video: NVIDIA

Gamers had their own favorite. At CES 2025, Huang promised that the $549 RTX 5070 would match the RTX 4090. The claim relied on AI-generated frames, and "fake frames" jokes followed for months.

Huang promises RTX 4090 performance from a $549 RTX 5070 at CES 2025, a claim gamers mocked as fake frames. Video: NVIDIA

In October 2025, a fried chicken dinner in Seoul with the heads of Samsung and Hyundai went viral. Korean fried chicken stocks jumped as much as 30% the next day, a frenzy that Tom's Hardware called "Jensanity" in its headline.

The AI boom made Nvidia the world's most valuable company. It briefly topped a $1 trillion market value in May 2023 and became the first company to reach $5 trillion in October 2025. Huang even joked about being the "chief revenue destroyer" when new chips made his old ones look slow.

Huang also spent more and more time talking to young people about AI. He told National Taiwan University graduates in 2023 to "run, don't walk" toward it. At Stanford in 2024, he wished students "ample doses of pain and suffering" to build resilience.

Less than three weeks before his resignation, on his first visit to Kazakhstan, he spoke at an AI center in Astana. An audience member asked what he would learn if he were 18 and living there today. Huang said he envied that age, because AI is resetting everything. He would "dedicate myself to be the world's best programmer of AI," he said.

Asked in Astana what he would learn at 18, Huang says he would become the world's best programmer of AI. Video: Astana Hub

That answer sums up how Huang saw his own path. He came of age with the personal computer and spent 43 years building on it. Those stories made him one of the most recognizable CEOs in the world, and the only CEO Nvidia ever had. That is why his exit lands so hard, and why the next chapter is so uncertain.

What happens to Nvidia next

The first reaction came from the market. On November 11, The Wall Street Journal reported that the board was preparing to remove Huang. Nvidia shares fell more than 8% in after-hours trading. That followed an 8.8% drop at the open two days earlier. Before the market opened on November 12, they were down about 10%, at around $155. That was the lowest level since July 2025.

The stock has lost more than 20% in a month, according to CNBC. Yahoo Finance counted about $2 trillion in market value erased since Nvidia's record close of $239.24 on October 6. Before the open, Nvidia was on track to fall behind Apple as the world's most valuable company.

Analysts split over what the change means:

  • Bernstein: Stacy Rasgon downgraded the stock to market perform and cut his price target from $400 to $200
  • Oppenheimer: downgraded the stock, seeing "massive shoes to fill and no obvious successor"
  • Wedbush: Dan Ives cut his target from $300 to $225, writing that "the writing is on the wall"
  • Raymond James: Simon Leopold kept a strong buy rating, saying the business fundamentals are unchanged

The selling spread to Nvidia's customers. CoreWeave fell about 13% and Nebius about 20% before the open, according to Yahoo Finance.

For now, the company is in Kress's hands. She is 59 and has been Nvidia's CFO since September 2013, after finance roles at Cisco, Microsoft and Texas Instruments. She steered the company's finances through the AI boom. In the second quarter, Nvidia reported revenue of about $96 billion, roughly double a year earlier. Her first public test comes on November 17, when Nvidia reports third-quarter results as planned.

Jones has sat on Nvidia's board since 1993, the year the company was founded. He led chip design software maker Synopsys for more than a decade and co-founded Daisy Systems and Tensilica. Nvidia had never had a separate board chair before.

The permanent job is open. Analysts quoted by Reuters named Ian Buck, the creator of the CUDA platform, as a leading internal candidate. Some suggested Kress could keep the role, and others floated outside names such as Arm CEO Rene Haas. Nvidia has not commented on any candidate. Huang still owns about 3.6% of the company, according to LSEG data cited by Reuters. Nvidia's single class of shares gives him no special voting control.

Whoever gets the job will also inherit Huang's place in Washington. He was Nvidia's chief product voice, its main link to customers like OpenAI and Microsoft, and a regular visitor to the White House. President Trump had called him "an honorable guy" days before the resignation.

Lawmakers say they are not done. The House China committee and others had asked Huang to attend a closed-door briefing by November 18. Chairman John Moolenaar said "we are going to continue to pursue this" after the news broke. A securities class action against Nvidia and Huang was also filed on November 9.

The China question will follow Nvidia whoever leads it. Its chips are already largely shut out of China, and its current guidance excludes Chinese data center sales. Scrutiny of where its hardware ends up, including through partners like Megaspeed, is likely to grow.

Can Nvidia keep its lead without Jensen Huang

In the short term, little changes for customers. Nvidia's chip roadmap runs years ahead, its engineering bench is deep, and demand for AI hardware still outstrips supply. The November 17 earnings will show whether that demand holds.

The longer test is leadership. Huang set Nvidia's strategy for three decades, from graphics cards to CUDA to AI data centers. An interim CEO who is also CFO can keep the business steady. The board still needs a permanent leader who can make the next big bets. Until it names one and finishes its investigation, the questions around Huang will weigh on the world's most important AI chipmaker.

Sources

Portrait of Felix Laurent, author at thehype.news

Felix Laurent

News Writer at thehype. Felix is a journalist with experience in marketing. He covers artificial intelligence and emerging technologies, focusing on the ideas, innovations, and trends shaping the future of tech.

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