Jensen Huang Leaves Nvidia After 33 Years, and Colette Kress Steps In

For 33 years, Nvidia had one chief executive. On Thursday, Jensen Huang resigned as president, CEO and director, effective immediately, and Colette Kress, the chief financial officer since 2013, became interim CEO while keeping her finance job. The board named Harvey C. Jones, a director since 1993, as its first-ever chair, opened a search for a permanent CEO and said operations and the product roadmap will continue without interruption.

Three Decisions in One Announcement

Nvidia's announcement on Thursday morning did three things at once. It accepted Huang's resignation from every role he held. It handed the chief executive's job, on an interim basis, to Kress, who remains executive vice president and CFO until a permanent successor is named. And it gave the board a chair of its own for the first time, while a search considers internal and external candidates.

The release gives no reason for the departure and includes no statement from Huang. It comes days after Huang acknowledged a romantic relationship with a woman U.S. intelligence officials believe is a Chinese spy, according to CNBC and TechCrunch. Nvidia's board has opened an independent investigation and has said it has no reason to believe trade secrets or national security were compromised, Yahoo Finance reported.

Investors reacted quickly. Nvidia shares fell nearly 12% in early trading on Thursday, TechCrunch reported, and CNBC said the company's market value slipped below $4 trillion at the open. The board's answer to that uncertainty was the person it chose to run the company.

The CFO Who Financed a 16x Quarter

Kress joined Nvidia in September 2013 after nearly 25 years in finance at technology companies. At Cisco she was chief financial officer of the business technology and operations finance organization, and at Microsoft she spent about 13 years, including as CFO of the Server and Tools division. At Nvidia she has been the person explaining the numbers to investors through the whole AI build-out.

That is more than 16 times the $5.93 billion Nvidia booked in the quarter that ended in October 2022, weeks before ChatGPT turned its chips into the most sought-after hardware in tech, TechCrunch noted.

Harvey Jones put the board's case plainly in the announcement: “Colette has helped lead NVIDIA through a period of extraordinary growth and has a deep understanding of our business.” The board, he said, has full confidence in her and in the leadership team. Jones himself is the other half of the new arrangement.

A First-Ever Chair, and Earnings on Tuesday

Jones has sat on Nvidia's board since 1993, the year Huang co-founded the company, TechCrunch reported. He is a former chief executive and executive chairman of Synopsys, the chip design software company, and a managing partner at Square Wave Ventures. Until Thursday, Nvidia had never had a board chair. Now the person running the company and the person running the board are different people, a split many large companies use to keep oversight independent.

Huang remains the company's largest individual shareholder, with about 3.5% of the stock and no special voting rights, according to TechCrunch.

“I am committed to building on the extraordinary foundation Jensen created over the last 33 years. — Colette Kress, Nvidia interim CEO and CFO”

The first test comes quickly. Nvidia will report its third-quarter results on Tuesday, November 17, as previously scheduled, with a conference call at 2 p.m. Pacific time. For the first time in the company's history, those results will arrive without Jensen Huang in charge.