Key points
- Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia's CEO and left its board
- Nvidia CFO Colette Kress is interim CEO during the search
- Nvidia shares fell 13.4% after the open
Jensen Huang has resigned as president and chief executive of Nvidia (NVDA) and left its board, effective immediately, the company announced on Nov. 12. Chief financial officer Colette Kress will serve as interim CEO while the board searches for a permanent one.
Nvidia shares fell 13.4% to $150.49 shortly after the open, as of 9:31 a.m. ET, from the Nov. 11 close of $173.73. At that price, the company's market value would be about $560 billion below its value at the close.
The board accepted Huang's resignation on Nov. 11, according to Nvidia's filing with the SEC. That was the day The Wall Street Journal reported the board was preparing to oust him. Neither the filing nor the press release gives a reason for the resignation or describes any severance arrangement.
Colette Kress will run Nvidia and stay on as CFO
Kress, 59, has been Nvidia's CFO since September 2013. She will keep that job while she serves as interim CEO, according to the release. Before Nvidia, she spent nearly 25 years in finance roles at technology companies, including Cisco and Microsoft.
The board will consider internal and external candidates for the permanent job. The release gives no timeline for the search.
"I am committed to building on the extraordinary foundation Jensen created over the last 33 years," Kress said in the release.
Harvey Jones becomes Nvidia's first board chair
The board also named Harvey C. Jones, 73, as its first-ever chair. Jones has been an Nvidia director since 1993, according to the filing, and is a former CEO and executive chairman of chip design software maker Synopsys.
Jones said the board expects "the company's operations, customer commitments and product roadmap to continue without interruption."
Nvidia still reports earnings on Nov. 17
Nvidia will report fiscal third-quarter results on Nov. 17 at about 1:20 p.m. PT, as previously scheduled, with its earnings call at 2 p.m. PT. Three House Republican committee chairmen had asked Huang to brief them behind closed doors on Nov. 18.
Huang acknowledged an affair on Nov. 8. That day, the board opened an independent investigation into reporting that he was the target of a foreign intelligence effort. The directors then hired Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to run it. The filing doesn't say whether that investigation will continue.
Megaspeed, the Singapore company where Alice Huang was a senior executive, pledged on Nov. 12 to cooperate with US investigators.
We're tracking each development on our Jensen Huang scandal timeline.
Market value multiplies the share price by the 24.1 billion shares on the cover of Nvidia's latest quarterly filing with the SEC.
Cover photo: Peter Dasilva / European Union, 2024, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0, cropped.
