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Nvidia announced on November 12 2026 that its board had accepted Jensen Huang’s resignation as president chief executive and board member effective immediately with chief financial officer Colette Kress named interim chief executive while continuing her existing duties. The company said in a statement that the board would consider both internal and external candidates for a permanent replacement and had appointed former Synopsys chief executive Harvey C. Jones as its first board chair. According to the Wall Street Journal the board met the previous evening to determine Huang’s future after a series of media reports detailed his personal relationships and their potential national security implications.
The resignation caps an investigation that Nvidia’s board opened on November 8 after The New York Times reported that US officials believed Huang had been the target of a Chinese intelligence operation. In an internal memo released that day Huang acknowledged he had been unfaithful to his wife of more than 40 years stating “I owe my family and all of you an apology. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry.” The New York Times later reported that Huang also maintained a relationship with Kimberly Powell Nvidia’s vice president of healthcare who reported directly to him a claim the company has not confirmed.
US intelligence officials suspect that Alice Huang an executive at Singapore-based cloud computing firm Megaspeed served as a Chinese intelligence asset who developed a close relationship with the Nvidia chief to gather information according to multiple accounts in The New York Times and The Washington Post. Megaspeed had purchased large volumes of Nvidia chips for AI data centers in Southeast Asia with US authorities investigating whether some were diverted to China in violation of export controls The Associated Press reported. A shareholder lawsuit filed in California on November 10 accuses Nvidia and Huang of misleading investors about the relationship and its risks seeking to represent those who bought shares between October 2025 and November 8 2026.
Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 with two fellow engineers after conceiving the company at a Denny’s restaurant in San Jose California CNN Business reported. The firm nearly collapsed in its first decade after a flawed chip design but recovered with a timely investment from Sega and later dominated the market for graphics processors that proved essential for training artificial intelligence models. By mid-2026 Nvidia’s market value had climbed as high as 5.7 trillion dollars with the company supplying an estimated 90 percent of advanced AI chips industry analysts cited by The Atlantic noted.
The scandal has erased more than 190 billion dollars in Nvidia’s market value in a single session with shares falling as much as 8.6 percent in after-hours trading on November 11 Forbes reported. Reuters described Huang’s departure as a significant blow to the artificial intelligence sector where he had emerged as a leading advocate for US technology leadership while maintaining relationships with both American and Chinese officials. TechCrunch noted that the affair highlighted potential vulnerabilities in how executives at strategically important firms manage personal relationships amid geopolitical tensions over semiconductor technology.
Nvidia’s statement emphasised that the board retained independent legal counsel from the firm Wachtell Lipton Rosen and Katz to oversee the review into whether Huang had been compromised by foreign intelligence. The Justice Department has taken over aspects of the federal investigation into Megaspeed and related activities The New York Times reported. Huang who began his working life washing dishes at a Denny’s in Oregon had transformed the company from near bankruptcy to global dominance before the events that prompted his exit from the role he held for more than three decades.
