Nvidia loses Jensen Huang: CFO Kress steps in as interim CEO

Nvidia shares fell more than 11% in premarket trading on Thursday after the company announced that Jensen Huang has resigned as president and chief executive. The move caps a week in which the chipmaker's market value has dropped by more than $300 billion since Friday.

In a regulatory filing, Nvidia said its board accepted Huang's resignation on Wednesday. The departure follows days after Huang admitted to a romantic affair with an alleged Chinese spy, a disclosure that sparked a U.S. national security crisis.

Who runs Nvidia now?

CFO and executive vice president Colette Kress takes over as interim CEO while the company searches for a permanent successor. She keeps the CFO title alongside the interim role. The board also appointed Harvey Jones, managing partner of Square Wave Ventures and former CEO of Synopsys, as Nvidia's first-ever chair of the board of directors. Jones has sat on the Nvidia board since 1993 — three decades of continuity, at least, in the boardroom.

"Jensen's contributions to NVIDIA are profound. NVIDIA is one of the most consequential technology companies in the world. The Board and the company thank Jensen for his immeasurable contributions to the company and the industry," Nvidia said in a statement.

What does the change mean for Nvidia's AI empire?

The practical question is money. Huang drove Nvidia's sprawling AI investment machine, which bankrolled everything from startups building new technologies to the enormous data centers that run them. Nvidia used its balance sheet to support customers buying its chips — effectively financing demand for its own product — and lobbied Washington to relax proposed rules around AI and data center regulation.

The numbers at stake are considerable:

• $99 billion in investments held as of the end of the second quarter, plus a further $25 billion in commitments.
• $36 billion in cloud service commitments — arrangements that help AI cloud operators finance the GPUs and data center equipment they buy from Nvidia, with Nvidia agreeing to buy compute from them and potentially take a share of their revenue.
• $2 billion invested in CoreWeave in January and another $2 billion in Nebius in March, part of a direct push into neoclouds serving AI processing demand.
• Up to $105 billion in credit guarantees signed for an OpenAI data center campus in Ohio, which could leave Nvidia with substantial financial exposure if that project runs into trouble.

Nvidia was also reported to be considering acting as guarantor for Nscale's planned West Virginia data center project — another contingent liability now sitting on the desk of an interim chief executive.

Why the market is nervous

Huang was not a conventional CEO. He personally anchored Nvidia's relationships across the AI supply chain, from hyperscale buyers to fledgling neoclouds, and his departure raises unresolved questions about who steers those commitments next. An interim chief who doubles as CFO can keep the books, but counterparties will reasonably ask who owns the strategy.

For CIOs and data center operators, the exposure runs both ways. Nvidia's financing arrangements underpin a significant share of AI infrastructure buildout; any retreat from those commitments under new leadership would ripple through capacity plans and procurement timelines. The $300 billion market cap loss already signals how investors price that uncertainty.

What does this change for buyers? In the short term, nothing operational — chips ship, guarantees stand, commitments remain on paper. The watch item is succession: a permanent CEO's appetite for the $99 billion investment book, and for the Ohio exposure, will set the tone for the next phase of the AI buildout.

This story is developing.