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Jensen Huang is out at Nvidia. The CEO resigned Thursday, effective immediately, four days after the board opened an internal investigation into his affair with a woman US reports have tied to Chinese intelligence. CFO Colette Kress steps in as interim CEO.
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Nvidia's board announced Thursday that Jensen Huang had resigned as president, chief executive and board member, effective immediately. Colette Kress, the company's chief financial officer, will serve as interim CEO. The exit lands four days after the board said it was launching an internal investigation into Huang's affair with Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le.
The board's probe was announced November 8, less than two weeks after The New York Times reported that Huang had been the target of a Chinese intelligence operation run through his relationship with Alice Huang, who has no known relation to him. On November 6, The New York Times and the Financial Times reported that Alice was a spy for China's Ministry of State Security, recruited to gather information on the Nvidia executive. The Chinese government has rejected all claims that she was a spy. The two have been seen together in public at least twice, in June 2024 and May 2025, and US intelligence officials reportedly briefed President Donald Trump on the relationship last year without the president acting on it.
The picture got messier on November 11, when The New York Times reported that Huang also allegedly had a relationship with a direct report at Nvidia. A source familiar with the matter tells WIRED that the subordinate relationship, along with Huang's business dealings with Singapore-based AI company Megaspeed, likely weighed more heavily in the board's decision than the espionage allegations. Alice Huang previously held a senior position at Megaspeed.
Huang sent a companywide email on Sunday acknowledging the affair, apologizing to his family and Nvidia employees, and pledging to cooperate with the internal investigation. He has been married to Lori Huang since 1985, and both of their children work at the company. On Monday, WIRED exclusively reported that Huang began working with a crisis PR firm last year to manage his personal communications, and that by October 2025 those consultants were looped into all press inquiries involving him, personal or professional.
That timing overlaps with an October New York Times report that the US Commerce Department was investigating whether Megaspeed was helping Chinese companies dodge American export controls through a web of subsidiaries. The investigation was reportedly halted and moved to the Justice Department after Nvidia general counsel Tim Teter asked about it. Huang has been a loud critic of those export controls, arguing they shrink the market for American chips, split the tech world into rival camps and push China to build its own competitive silicon.
Huang cofounded Nvidia in 1993 with friends Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, sketching the vision in a Denny's diner with the goal of bringing realistic 3D graphics to personal computers. The company spent its first decades as a gaming name, then pivoted in 2012 to AI chips after the neural network AlexNet, built by Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever and Geoffrey Hinton, won a major computer vision prize and Huang dubbed it a "Big Bang" moment for computing. Nvidia's shares rocketed through 2023 and 2024, and in summer 2025 it became the first company to cross $4 trillion in value. As of September 2026 it controlled about 90 percent of the GPU market, a run long credited as much to Huang's fast-moving, bombastic leadership as to its chips and its CUDA software moat.
TopicsNvidia · Jensen Huang · Alice Huang · Colette Kress · Megaspeed · Donald Trump · WIRED · The New York Times
Written by Paparazzi with AI. Not financial advice.
