Jensen Huang Resigns as Nvidia CEO, Kress Named Interim

What happened: Jensen Huang is out at Nvidia

Nvidia's Board of Directors said on November 12, 2026 that Jensen Huang has resigned as the company's President, Chief Executive Officer, and a member of the Board, effective immediately. The announcement came in a press release from Nvidia's newsroom and in a Form 8-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Huang had led Nvidia as CEO since he co-founded the company in 1993, a run of 33 years that turned a graphics-chip startup into one of the most valuable technology companies in the world and the dominant supplier of the GPUs underpinning the current AI buildout. Kress's own statement on the transition nodded to that history directly, crediting Huang with "the extraordinary foundation" built "over the last 33 years." Nvidia's board, for its part, said simply that "Jensen's contributions to NVIDIA are profound," calling Nvidia "one of the most consequential technology companies in the world" and thanking Huang for his "immeasurable contributions to the company and the industry" — notably brief, formal language for the exit of a company's founding CEO, and a contrast with the more effusive send-offs boards typically give departing founders who leave on their own terms.

The company has given no public indication of what, if anything, happens next for Huang personally. He is not listed as retaining any advisory, consulting, or emeritus role at Nvidia in the November 12 disclosures, and the 8-K describes his departure in the plainest terms available under SEC rules: a resignation from all three of his posts — president, CEO, and director — effective immediately, with no transition period and no stated severance arrangement.

In his place, the board turned to the person who already runs Nvidia's books. Colette Kress, Nvidia's Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer since 2013, has agreed to serve as Interim Chief Executive Officer. She will keep both the CFO title and duties while serving as interim CEO, the company said, until a permanent successor is named. Separately, longtime director Harvey C. Jones was appointed Chair of the Board — a standalone chair position Nvidia has never had before, since Huang had combined the chief executive and boardroom leadership roles throughout the company's history.

The underlying SEC filing shows the board's action was actually taken a day earlier than the public announcement: the 8-K's cover page and Item 5.02 disclosure list November 11, 2026 as the date the board accepted Huang's resignation and appointed Kress and Jones to their new roles, with the press release and public disclosure following on November 12. That filing was signed by Kress herself, in her new capacity as "Interim Chief Executive Officer, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer."

The investigation that preceded the resignation

The transition does not arrive out of nowhere. It follows roughly 72 hours of escalating governance news at Nvidia. On November 9, the board disclosed it had launched an independent investigation into Huang tied to national-security and corporate-espionage concerns raised internally. Two days later, on November 11, Nvidia's independent directors said they had retained outside counsel Joon Kim to lead that inquiry, underscoring that the probe was being run at arm's length from company management rather than by Huang's own executive team.

Nvidia's November 12 statement on the CEO transition does not tie Huang's resignation explicitly to the outcome of that investigation, and the company has not published findings from the inquiry. This article covers the confirmed leadership transition itself; readers looking for background on the investigation that preceded it should consult Pandromeda's earlier coverage linked above rather than unverified third-party reporting about its subject matter. We are not reporting personal-conduct allegations that have circulated in other outlets, because they have not been confirmed in any primary Nvidia or regulatory filing.

Who is Colette Kress, Nvidia's new interim CEO

Kress, 59, joined Nvidia as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer in September 2013. Before that, according to Nvidia's own biography of her, she spent nearly 25 years in finance leadership roles at large technology companies, including Cisco and Microsoft. At Nvidia, she has run the finance organization through the company's buildout of its data-center and AI-accelerator business, and the board's statement credits her with having "helped lead NVIDIA through a period of extraordinary growth" and having "a deep understanding of our business, customers, operations and financial position," in Jones's words.

In her own statement accompanying the announcement, Kress said: "NVIDIA's strength has always come from its people, and together with our leadership team, I am committed to building on the extraordinary foundation Jensen created over the last 33 years. We will continue advancing the work that has made NVIDIA a leader in accelerated computing and AI, and execute on the opportunities ahead. Our focus remains on serving our customers, partners, developers and shareholders."

Keeping the CFO title while serving as interim CEO is an unusual dual-hat arrangement for a company of Nvidia's size, but it is a structure boards sometimes use to signal continuity: Kress does not need to be briefed on the balance sheet, the supply chain commitments to customers like Microsoft and Meta, or the guidance Nvidia has already given markets, because she has been setting that guidance herself for more than a decade. Her full biography is published on Nvidia's newsroom bio page.

Harvey C. Jones becomes Nvidia's first-ever Board Chair

The board also used the moment to formally separate the chairmanship from the CEO's office for the first time in Nvidia's history, appointing Harvey C. Jones as Chair of the Board. Jones, 73, is not an Nvidia employee or executive: per the company's own disclosure, he has served on Nvidia's board since 1993 and has been Managing Partner of Square Wave Ventures, a private family office, since 2004, with more than 30 years of experience as an entrepreneur, technology executive, and venture investor, including a stint as CEO and later Executive Chairman of Synopsys.

In the Nvidia statement, Jones framed the transition as a vote of confidence in the existing bench rather than a wholesale reset: "Colette has helped lead NVIDIA through a period of extraordinary growth and has a deep understanding of our business, customers, operations and financial position. She is supported by an experienced leadership team that has been instrumental in executing NVIDIA's strategy and advancing its technology roadmap. The Board has full confidence in Colette and the leadership team, and we expect the company's operations, customer commitments and product roadmap to continue without interruption."

Creating a standalone chair role, held by a director with no day-to-day operating duties at Nvidia, is also a governance signal in its own right — it puts board oversight of whoever becomes permanent CEO in the hands of someone structurally separate from company management, at the same moment the company is navigating the fallout of an internal investigation into its prior chief executive.

Why separating the chair from the CEO's office is a big deal at Nvidia

For more than three decades, Nvidia's board leadership and its chief executive's office sat with the same person. That is not unusual for founder-led technology companies — plenty of them combine the roles for years, on the logic that a founder's authority over the board is part of what lets them make fast, high-conviction bets. It is, however, a structure that corporate-governance advocates have long flagged as a risk precisely for moments like this one: when a board needs to investigate, discipline, or remove its own CEO, having that CEO also chair the board that is supposed to be overseeing him is an obvious conflict.

Nvidia's board did not have to wait for a proxy season or a shareholder proposal to fix that structure. By appointing Jones — a 33-year director with an outside investing career and no Nvidia operating title — as a standalone chair in the same breath as accepting Huang's resignation, the board effectively closed that structural gap at the same moment it created the vacancy. Whoever is eventually named permanent CEO will report into a board chaired by someone other than themselves, a governance arrangement Nvidia has never had before.

Timeline: Nvidia's leadership shake-up, day by day

What the search for a permanent CEO looks like

Nvidia's board said it is "initiating a search for a permanent Chief Executive Officer and will consider internal and external candidates," language that leaves open whether Kress herself could be named permanently to the role rather than staying in an interim capacity. The company has not set or disclosed a timetable for completing the search, and it has not named a search committee, search firm, or shortlist.

For a company Nvidia's size — the dominant supplier of AI training and inference GPUs, with product roadmaps, supply agreements, and export-control compliance programs that span years — an external hire would face a steep onboarding curve. An internal promotion, whether Kress or another executive, would trade that onboarding risk for continuity, at the cost of signaling less of a clean break from the Huang era if that is what the board's investigation ultimately calls for.

Keeping Kress in the CFO seat while she serves as interim CEO also buys the board time without destabilizing financial reporting during the search: Nvidia does not need to find, vet, and onboard a new CFO at the exact moment it is also searching for a new chief executive, and it does not need to rush the permanent-CEO process to relieve an interim leader who is stretched too thin, since Kress already has an EVP-level team running day-to-day finance operations under her. That buys the board more real time to run a considered search — internal or external — than an interim arrangement with a less experienced executive might have allowed.

Why this matters beyond Nvidia's boardroom

Nvidia is not just another public company changing CEOs; it is the supplier whose GPUs underpin the capital spending plans of nearly every major cloud and AI lab, and a bellwether stock for the broader AI trade. Customers and partners who have built multi-year compute plans around Nvidia hardware — including specialized GPU cloud providers that resell Nvidia capacity, such as CoreWeave, which posted triple-digit revenue growth in its own Q3 2026 earnings — will be watching for any sign that the leadership change affects product timelines, allocation decisions, or export-compliance posture. Nvidia's own statement sought to head off that concern directly, saying the board expects "the company's operations, customer commitments and product roadmap to continue without interruption."

Markets will render their own verdict starting with NVDA's open on the next trading day, and more substantively on November 17, when Kress leads her first earnings call as interim chief executive rather than solely as CFO.

What's next: the November 17 earnings call and the CEO search

Nvidia will report third-quarter fiscal 2027 financial results on Tuesday, November 17, at approximately 1:20 p.m. PT, "as previously scheduled," followed by its earnings call at 2 p.m. PT — confirmed both in the CEO-transition release and in Nvidia's separate conference-call notice. That call, covering the quarter ended October 25, 2026, will be the first time Kress speaks publicly as interim CEO rather than purely as CFO, and analysts are likely to use the Q&A session — ordinarily reserved for financial analysts and institutional investors — to press for more detail on the board's CEO search timeline and on whether the investigation into Huang produced any findings that will be disclosed.

Beyond November 17, the two threads to watch are the formal CEO search process — internal versus external, and whether Kress's "interim" tag becomes permanent — and whatever, if anything, Nvidia's board chooses to disclose about the investigation that preceded Huang's exit. Nvidia has not committed to a timeline for either. Pandromeda will update this story as the board makes further disclosures.

Written byMara Lindqvist

Mara Lindqvist edits the hardware desk. She covers graphics cards, processors, memory and storage, the foundries and chip designers behind them, and what the numbers on a spec sheet mean for people choosing a PC. Specifications in her stories come from manufacturer spec pages and datasheets.

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