Shocking!!! Jensen Huang officially resigned as Nvidia's president, CEO, and director on November 12, 2026, effective immediately!

This is the first CEO transition since the company was founded in 1993. The board announced that CFO Colette Kress would become interim CEO while continuing as CFO, and that it would launch a formal CEO search, considering both internal and external candidates.

Longtime director and former Synopsys CEO Harvey C. Jones was also appointed as the first board chairman.

The immediate trigger was a series of scandals: Huang admitted to having an extramarital affair with Huang Le, a woman suspected by US intelligence agencies of having ties to the MSS who had worked at Singapore data center company Megaspeed; he was subsequently reported to have had another affair with Kimberly Powell, a healthcare business vice president who reported to him.

The board had previously launched an independent investigation. Market and governance pressures escalated rapidly, ultimately ending in his resignation.

The stock fell sharply, at one point dropping more than 10%-14% premarket and after the open. Its market capitalization fell below $4 trillion, with a record-scale loss in market value in a single day, dragging down AI-related stocks overall.

Many institutions cut their price targets or ratings. Their main concerns are the realization of key-person risk and potential disruption to geopolitical dynamics and the pace of ecosystem investments.

The company emphasized that operations, customer commitments, and product roadmaps would continue uninterrupted, and that it would release its fiscal 2027 third-quarter results and hold a conference call as scheduled on November 17.

So I thought about what comes next for Nvidia.

In the short term, Kress will serve as interim CEO, providing continuity in financial management and investor communications.

She joined in 2013 and witnessed and helped drive the massive transformation from gaming GPUs to AI data centers. She is a familiar voice on Wall Street.

The priority is to reassure customers, partners, developers, and shareholders, while advancing its leadership in accelerated computing and AI.

In the medium to long term, the board is considering both internal and external candidates. Potential candidates being widely discussed in the market include:

Internally, Ian Buck, a key driver of CUDA and head of hyperscale/high-performance computing, has a strong technical background and is seen as a leading long-term internal candidate; Chris Malachowsky, one of the co-founders; and other senior executives.

Externally, Arm CEO Rene Haas, a former Nvidia executive with solid industry experience and public profile; other semiconductor and tech executive names have also been mentioned, such as AMD's Lisa Su.

I feel the formal choice is more likely to favor a leader with deep engineering and product expertise who can navigate a complex ecosystem and geopolitics, rather than someone with a purely financial background.

Jensen Huang is a central figure in the company's technology vision, customer relationships, ecosystem investments, and policy lobbying. It will be difficult for a successor to fully replicate this combination of personal brand and strategic leadership.

As for execution and roadmap continuity, Blackwell and subsequent platforms, along with the software ecosystem (CUDA, etc.), are relatively clear for the next few years. The real risks lie in execution pace, maintaining customer relationships, and ecosystem investments. For example, Huang was personally deeply involved in allocating resources to cloud providers, labs, and others.

Another issue is geopolitics and China policy. Huang has long actively advocated for maintaining access to the Chinese market and has close ties to the Trump administration. After his departure, US export controls on advanced chips and oversight of remote computing power may become stricter, while Chinese customers are also rushing to rent computing capacity overseas.

In terms of corporate governance and rebuilding trust, the scandal involves national security suspicions and relationships with subordinates, so market and regulatory scrutiny will persist for some time.

So when is the next earnings window?
The November 17 Q3 earnings call will be the first key observation point, showing how management communicates stability.

Nvidia's technological moat and product cycle remain intact. Short-term uncertainty mainly comes from the leadership vacuum and market sentiment.

The board has quickly put a transitional structure in place (interim CEO + independent chairman). The choice of a permanent successor will determine whether the company can smoothly transition from founder-led management to more institutionalized long-term governance, and will have a major impact on the market.

$NVDA #黄仁勋辞职