NVIDIA said Jensen Huang resigned as chief executive and named Colette Kress interim CEO

NVIDIA’s board accepted the resignation of Jensen Huang as president, chief executive and member of the board on 11 November, effective immediately, according to a Form 8-K the company filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on 12 November. Neither the filing nor NVIDIA’s announcement of the same day gives a reason for the resignation, and neither mentions the investigation that NVIDIA’s board announced on 8 November “in light of recent reporting” that Huang had been the target of a foreign intelligence effort. The board said then that it had no reason to believe national security or NVIDIA secrets had been compromised, and on 10 November its independent members said they had retained Joon H. Kim and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to conduct it.

The board appointed Colette Kress, executive vice president and chief financial officer, as interim chief executive while it searches for a permanent one. The filing says she has been chief financial officer since 2013 and will keep that role. The board also appointed Harvey Jones, a director since 1993, as chair. In its press release of 12 November, NVIDIA described him as the board’s first-ever chair and said he had previously been chief executive and executive chairman of Synopsys.

Jones said in the release that the board expected “the company’s operations, customer commitments and product roadmap to continue without interruption”. NVIDIA said it would report its third-quarter fiscal 2027 results on 17 November, as previously scheduled.

Neither document mentions the automotive business. NVIDIA supplies the DRIVE AGX Thor in-vehicle computer, for which it released a compact driving model on 10 November, and in October Mercedes-Benz said it would pair its MB.OS operating system with NVIDIA’s compute and driving software.