--- title: "Nvidia: Jensen Huang steps down after 33 years, Kress named interim CEO" description: "Jensen Huang left the top job at Nvidia on Thursday 12 November 2026 after 33 years, with CFO Colette Kress stepping in as interim chief. Product roadmap, cloud giants, chip export talks: a great many files had his fingerprints on them." canonical: https://inyourgeek.com/en/articles/2026-11-12-nvidia-jensen-huang-quitte-la-direction-apres-33-ans type: article author: "Sébastien Soulier" publisher: "InYourGeek" language: en datePublished: 2026-11-12 dateModified: 2026-11-12 section: "Hardware" tags: ["nvidia", "gpu", "gouvernance", "semiconducteurs"] --- # Nvidia: Jensen Huang steps down after 33 years, Kress named interim CEO > Jensen Huang left the top job at Nvidia on Thursday 12 November 2026 after 33 years, with CFO Colette Kress stepping in as interim chief. Product roadmap, cloud giants, chip export talks: a great many files had his fingerprints on them. November 12, 2026 · Hardware · 3 min On Thursday 12 November 2026, Nvidia confirmed that Jensen Huang has resigned, effective immediately, as president, chief executive and board director, reports [Le Monde Informatique](https://www.lemondeinformatique.fr/donnees-ia/nvidia-jensen-huang-demissionne-colette-kress-pren). He co-founded the company in 1993 and had run it without a break for 33 years. At the time of writing this is our only source, so everything about the circumstances of his exit comes with a large “reportedly” stapled to it. ## A resignation, says the press release Nvidia calls it a resignation. Bloomberg, cited by Le Monde Informatique, reports that the boss was allegedly pushed out by the board, and the Wall Street Journal had indicated the board was getting ready to do just that. The backstory fits in a handful of dates. On 8 November, Jensen Huang acknowledged an extramarital relationship with a woman whom US intelligence agencies reportedly suspect of ties to Chinese intelligence. The New York Times is then said to have reported a second alleged relationship, this time with a Nvidia executive who answered to him. That same 8 November, the company opened an independent investigation, adding that it had no evidence its trade secrets or US national security had been compromised. Two caveats are worth keeping in view: the espionage allegations have not been publicly established, and the 12 November statement does not say the investigation found any wrongdoing. ## The CFO gets the corner office too The board has appointed Colette Kress, executive vice president and chief financial officer since September 2013, and before that an alumna of Cisco and Microsoft. She keeps her finance duties for the duration of the interim, until a permanent successor is named. Running the company while also keeping its books is a two-hat arrangement you normally meet at firms where the CEO also orders the printer paper. The board has also given itself a chair: Harvey C. Jones, former chief executive and then executive chairman of Synopsys. The role was created for the occasion. He will oversee the search for the next chief executive, with both internal and external candidates in the running. ## Roadmap: nothing to see here, says the board The official message is continuity. Harvey Jones says the board has “full confidence in Colette and the leadership team”, and that operations, customer commitments and the product roadmap are to carry on without interruption. Colette Kress stated: “I am committed to building on the extraordinary foundation Jensen has created over the past 33 years”. On paper, that holds up: no change to the product schedule and no contractual amendment has been announced. The markets, however, read the press release in their own dialect. The stock had dropped more than 8% on Wednesday evening after the close, then was down more than 10% on Thursday before the open, at around $156.67. According to Business Insider, CoreWeave, Micron, Supermicro and TSMC were also hit. ## China exports: an empty chair at the table This is where the source runs thinnest, and for good reason. Jensen Huang played a decisive role in the group's technology direction, in its relationships with the hyperscalers and in the negotiations around US restrictions on exporting advanced semiconductors. Nothing has been reported about who picks up that last file, nor about any shift in Nvidia's position. If you run an IT department or a cloud provider, your priority is unchanged: GPUs that keep shipping, software platforms that keep running and infrastructure projects that stay on track. So Nvidia insists nothing changes, apart from the name at the top of the org chart. That leaves one vacancy to fill, for a job that hasn't been open since 1993. Expect the job description to need a dust-off. ## Sources - [Nvidia : Jensen Huang démissionne, Colette Kress prend la direction par intérim](https://www.lemondeinformatique.fr/donnees-ia/nvidia-jensen-huang-demissionne-colette-kress-pren) — lemondeinformatique.fr _Article written with AI assistance from the cited sources, reviewed and approved by a human before publication._ --- Equivalent HTML page : https://inyourgeek.com/en/articles/2026-11-12-nvidia-jensen-huang-quitte-la-direction-apres-33-ans Published by InYourGeek — https://inyourgeek.com/en/a-propos Method and safeguards : https://inyourgeek.com/en/methode All articles : https://inyourgeek.com/en/archives