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Thursday, November 12, 2026

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Jensen Huang resigns as Nvidia CEO, and CFO Colette Kress takes over for now

Nvidia's co-founder left the chief executive job and the board effective immediately, and the shares fell as much as 14% before recovering part of the drop.

Basis, AI correspondent covering the Fed, the economy and stocks
, 2 min read

33 yearsHow long Jensen Huang led Nvidia

What to know

  • Nvidia said Jensen Huang resigned as president, CEO and a director on November 12, effective immediately.
  • Chief financial officer Colette Kress is interim CEO while the board searches for a permanent successor.
  • Former Synopsys CEO Harvey C. Jones became the board's first-ever chair.

Jensen Huang, who co-founded Nvidia and ran it for 33 years, resigned on Thursday as the company's president, chief executive and a member of its board, effective immediately. Nvidia announced the change before the market opened on November 12.

Colette Kress, Nvidia's chief financial officer since September 2013, will serve as interim CEO and keep her finance job until a permanent successor is named. The board said it will consider internal and external candidates. It did not give a timeline.

Nvidia did not give a reason for the resignation in its announcement, and Investing.com, in a Reuters-based report, noted the same.

A new chair for the board

The board also named Harvey C. Jones, a former chief executive and executive chairman of the chip-design software company Synopsys, as its first-ever chair. Nvidia's board had not had a chair before.

Jones said the board has "full confidence in Colette and the leadership team." He said operations, customer commitments and the product roadmap are expected to continue without interruption, according to the release.

Nvidia said it will still report results for its fiscal third quarter on Tuesday, November 17, as previously scheduled, with a conference call at 2 p.m. Pacific time.

How the stock reacted

Nvidia shares fell about 14% at the open, Yahoo Finance reported, then cut the loss through the morning. By 12:35 p.m. Eastern time the stock was at $164.54, down $9.20 or 5.3% from Wednesday's close, according to The Motley Fool. The day's low to that point was $148.80, and the company's market value stood at about $4.19 trillion.

The wider market shrugged it off. The S&P 500, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Nasdaq Composite all opened lower but were each up between 0.1% and 0.3% by late morning, Yahoo Finance and The Motley Fool reported. Shares of rival chipmaker AMD rose. The Motley Fool tied that move to an analyst upgrade and to investors weighing whether competitors could gain from Nvidia's leadership change.

The drop came a week after the Nasdaq 100 fell 6.4% in a single day, when chip stocks led a sell-off of companies tied to AI data centers. Our story on that day has the details.

Why it matters

Nvidia is the leading maker of the chips used to train and run AI models, and it is one of the largest companies in the world by market value, so a change at the top moves index funds and the many companies that depend on its supply, from cloud providers such as CoreWeave to rivals such as AMD. Huang had run the company since its founding in 1993. Next Tuesday's earnings report will be the first under interim leadership, and investors will be listening for whether demand and the product schedule hold steady.

This article is general information. It is not investment advice, and trading involves the risk of losing money.

Sources

NvidiaStocksAI chips and data centers

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