Report says Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia CEO, with Colette Kress named interim CEOMachine translation

Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia’s CEO and left its board, ending more than 33 years running the company. Finance chief Colette Kress becomes interim CEO, and director Harvey Jones becomes Nvidia’s first-ever board chair. The exit came 3 days after the board opened an outside probe into reports that Huang was a foreign intelligence target. US officials suspect Alice Huang, with whom he had an affair, of spying for China while working at a firm that moved restricted Nvidia chips there. Further, yesterday, The New York Times reported a second affair, with an executive who reported directly to him. Shares fell about 10% before the open, which would lift 2 weeks of losses to roughly $1.4T. Huang had resisted succession planning, so he leaves dozens of direct reports, no clear No. 2 and an earnings call next week. Nvidia’s next CEO will oversee its $100B of investments in other companies, including a planned $10B purchase of Anthropic shares when it goes public next week.

WSJ: Nvidia named finance chief Colette Kress interim CEO after Jensen Huang resigned with immediate effect. Kress, 59, keeps her CFO role while the board weighs internal and external successors. Before Nvidia, she held finance roles at Cisco, Microsoft and Texas Instruments Recently, Kress has defended Nvidia’s customer backstops against charges of circular financing.