Jensen Huang Out, Kress Steps In as Nvidia Faces a Looming Earnings Test
Colette Kress is interim CEO while remaining CFO, and Nvidia gave no reason for the exit.
Nvidia said Thursday that founder Jensen Huang has resigned as president, chief executive and board member, effective immediately.
Chief financial officer Colette Kress becomes interim CEO while keeping her finance role, and Harvey Jones becomes the company’s first independent board chair.
The announcement offered no reason for the exit or any comment from Huang.
For companies whose data centers, products or budgets depend on Nvidia hardware, that silence matters as much as the share price, because their purchasing plans were made with Huang in charge.
Four days from investigation to resignation
Thursday’s release addressed none of this, said nothing on whether the investigation is complete, and carried no comment from Huang.
The corporate sequence began Sunday when the board announced an independent investigation following internal governance disclosures. The board stated at the time that it had no reason to believe national security or core Nvidia trade secrets were compromised.
On Tuesday, independent directors retained former acting U.S. attorney Joon Kim and his firm, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, to lead the external probe.
Thursday’s sudden leadership filing addressed none of the ongoing findings, offered no comment on whether the investigation had concluded, and carried no comment from Huang.
One executive, two of the hardest jobs
Kress has been Nvidia’s finance chief since September 2013, after nearly 25 years in finance roles at Cisco and Microsoft, the company says.
She remains CFO while serving as interim CEO until the board names a permanent successor, from inside or outside the company.
Analysts cited by CNBC have floated internal names including Ian Buck, Bryan Catanzaro, Michael Kagan and Bill Dally. Reports also cited Arm chief Rene Haas.
Holding both jobs puts one executive in charge of running the business and presenting its numbers, a setup that gets harder to sustain the longer a search runs.
Jones, a former Synopsys chief executive, is the first person to hold the chair role at Nvidia, per the newsroom.
The first checkpoint is Tuesday, when Nvidia reports fiscal third-quarter results at about 1:20 p.m. Pacific, followed by a 2 p.m. call. Both remain on schedule.
Market fallout and regional scrambles
Harvey Jones said the board expects operations, customer commitments and the product roadmap to continue uninterrupted. But that is an expectation, not a guarantee, and investors remain unconvinced.
Shares fell 8.2% to a more than 16-month low in early trading, per Reuters, making the company’s chart-topping valuation slip near $4 trillion. The turmoil also hit AI hardware stocks, dragging down partners such as CoreWeave and Dell.
Meanwhile, Broadcom and major cloud providers such as Amazon gained as investors reassessed the competitive outlook.
Beyond Western markets, the leadership crisis also pushed Chinese AI firms to secure overseas Nvidia computing capacity in Southeast Asia ahead of possible US restrictions.
Commitments are already in motion: on October 27, Nvidia and Oracle announced an expansion of Vera Rubin systems to multi-gigawatt scale.
Nothing in the announcement points to a supply disruption. The permanent hire and the investigation’s findings will shape the relationship well beyond this quarter.
Source: NVIDIA Announces CEO Transition
