Jensen Huang resigns as Nvidia CEO; CFO Colette Kress named interim

Jensen Huang resigned as chief executive of Nvidia effective immediately on November 12, 2026, ending 33 years in the role, and the company that supplies most of the GPU capacity behind open-weights inference now has an interim chief. Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress took the seat on an acting basis, with no permanent successor named.

Key facts

• Jensen Huang resigned as President, CEO, and board member of Nvidia effective immediately, announced by the company's own newsroom release on November 12, 2026.
• Colette Kress, chief financial officer since September 2013, is interim CEO while the board searches for a permanent successor among internal and external candidates.
• Harvey C. Jones, a venture investor and former Synopsys chief executive, was appointed the company's first-ever chair of the board in the same announcement.
• Nvidia agreed in September 2026 to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, a deal announced under Huang with commitments to keep the platform open.
• Nvidia says it has released more than 500 open models and 250 open datasets on Hugging Face, including the Nemotron line.

What happened

The announcement is terse. Nvidia's board said Huang resigned as President, Chief Executive Officer, and a member of the board, effective immediately, and that Kress will serve as interim CEO while continuing as CFO until a permanent successor is named. Harvey C. Jones became the company's first board chair, a role that did not previously exist in the company's governance structure. The release quotes Jones saying the board has "full confidence" in Kress and the leadership team, and expects "customer commitments and product roadmap to continue without interruption."

The resignation itself lands without a stated reason. It follows roughly a week of reporting on Huang's extramarital affair with a woman described in press accounts as an alleged Chinese intelligence operative, and an Nvidia investigation into that relationship. The wire coverage, including the timeline published by CNBC and TechCrunch, connects the resignation to that week of disclosures; Nvidia's own release does not state a cause, and we present the scandal as reported context rather than as a company-confirmed explanation.

Kress is a known quantity to anyone who watches Nvidia's earnings calls. She joined in September 2013 after finance roles at Cisco and Microsoft, and has fronted the quarterlies through the company's run from a gaming-chip vendor to the dominant supplier of AI accelerators. The company kept its earnings schedule intact: Q3 fiscal 2027 results are due November 17, with the call at 2 p.m. Pacific. That call is now the first public test of the interim leadership, and the first place investors and customers will hear the roadmap defended by someone other than Huang.

Why it matters for open-weights builders

The open-weights ecosystem runs, almost without exception, on Nvidia hardware, and the strategy that put it there was Huang's personally. The company he leaves behind is mid-flight on several commitments that matter to people who run open models: the $12.93 billion Hugging Face acquisition announced September 3, under which Huang publicly promised that "Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face"; the Nemotron open-weights line, which put transcription and reasoning models like Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe 30B into weights-available distribution; and the reported hundreds of billions in Blackwell-class bookings that fund the datacenters open-weights inference is served from.

None of these have changed. The Hugging Face deal has not been rescinded, and Hugging Face chief executive Clem Delangue publicly committed to continuing the open-platform fight in the days after the resignation, per TechCrunch's follow-up coverage. But a $12.9 billion acquisition mid-integration and an open-model release cadence both depend on board-level priorities, and the person who set those priorities is gone. Kress inherits them without a stated mandate on any of them.

The other open question is export control. Huang was Washington's most prominent corporate voice against tightening chip restrictions, having co-signed a public letter arguing that open weights strengthen American AI leadership. His lobbying influence did not exist independently of his position. Whoever inherits the permanent seat inherits that advocacy role, and Washington's appetite for tightening Blackwell export rules may read the lobbying landscape differently with him out of the corner office. For builders, this is the difference between open-weights frontier models continuing to train on the fastest available hardware and training on whatever export rules allow.

Background

Nvidia's open-weights turn is recent and deliberate. The company spent years as a hardware supplier, then began releasing Nemotron models, datasets, and tooling on Hugging Face as a way to seed workloads that run on its chips. That strategy peaked with the Hugging Face acquisition we covered when it was announced in September, and continued through this fall's model releases, including the Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe 30B speech model and talks with Reflection AI on open frontier-model work. Every one of those moves carried Huang's public signature.

The governance change matters as much as the personnel one. Creating a board chair, rather than letting the CEO hold that combined role, separates oversight from execution in a way the company had never done. That is standard practice at most large public companies and brand new at Nvidia. It suggests the board wants structural distance from the founder era, which is a reasonable reading of a company that just lost the person who made its strategic decisions for 33 years.

The scandal itself is documented thoroughly by the wires, including CNBC's reporting on the company investigation and CNN's coverage of the resignation. We are not adding to that reporting here. What matters for this publication's readers is narrower: whether the hardware pipeline, the open-model releases, and the Hugging Face integration continue on the trajectory they were on last week. Nothing in the announcement suggests they do not, and nothing in it guarantees that they do.

What's next

Three dates and one decision point matter. First, Nvidia's Q3 fiscal 2027 earnings call on November 17 at 2 p.m. Pacific, where Kress will make her first public case that customer commitments hold. Second, the permanent CEO announcement, which the board says will consider internal and external candidates; the name tells you whether Nvidia intends continuity or a strategic reset. Third, any movement on the Hugging Face deal, which is the single clearest signal of whether the open-weights commitment survives the transition. If the deal closes on schedule and Nemotron releases continue, the open-weights ecosystem's supply side is intact. If either stalls, that is the signal to watch.