Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigns, CFO Colette Kress takes over

Nvidia's board has accepted Jensen Huang's resignation as president, CEO and board member, effective immediately, ending a 33-year run at the company he co-founded in 1993. The decision came after a late Wednesday board meeting, called hours after reports of a second extramarital affair, this time with an Nvidia executive who reported directly to him, landed on top of an earlier relationship with an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based cloud provider that US intelligence believes was passing information to China's Ministry of State Security.

What the board decided

According to Nvidia's own announcement, executive vice president and CFO Colette Kress becomes interim CEO while keeping the finance job, and the board has started a search for a permanent chief executive that will consider internal and external candidates. Harvey C. Jones, the former Synopsys CEO who has been on the board, was appointed the first chair of the board in Nvidia's history.

Kress has run Nvidia's finance organization since September 2013, after nearly 25 years in finance roles at Cisco and Microsoft. In the release she said operations, customer commitments and the product roadmap would continue without interruption, and the board said it has "full confidence" in her and the leadership team.

Huang had already admitted he was "unfaithful" in a memo to employees over the weekend and apologized to his family and shareholders. As late as Monday, investors and even the White House expected him to survive the scandal.

Why the market cares

Nvidia is the roughly $4.2 trillion company supplying the accelerators underneath nearly every frontier model, and Huang was the sector's most visible advocate. Its stock fell more than 13% before paring losses, CNBC reported.

The harder question is money. In August Nvidia signed memorandums of understanding with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR aimed at mobilizing more than $500 billion for AI infrastructure, with GPUs pledged as collateral in securitization-style vehicles. Those arrangements are still preliminary, and a new CEO gives every counterparty a reason to re-read the fine print. "The best thing a new CEO can do is leave these partnerships alone in the first few months and focus on getting the final agreements signed," Raymond James private capital advisory head Sunaina Sinha Haldea told CNBC.

Third-quarter fiscal 2027 results remain scheduled for November 17, which will be Kress's first earnings call in the top job.

What it means for builders

Capacity commitments signed against Nvidia's roadmap now carry a succession variable that did not exist last week. Three things to watch: whether the mega-fintech MOUs convert into final agreements, whether hyperscaler capex guidance moves at the next earnings round, and whether the permanent CEO keeps Huang's push to sell advanced chips into China. Teams renting GPU capacity should treat the next two quarters as a repricing window and revisit multi-vendor hedges, reserved-instance terms and any contract that names a specific Nvidia SKU roadmap as its delivery guarantee.