Nvidia announced on Thursday morning that Jensen Huang has resigned as president, CEO, and board member, effective immediately. For 33 years the co-founder was the company, so much so that there never was a succession plan for him. I wrote about the board preparing his removal two days ago. A week ago nobody expected this.
Colette Kress, until now CFO and executive vice president, is interim chief executive. The search for a permanent successor is still running.
Who Colette Kress is
Kress is 59, based in California, and has worked at Nvidia since September 2013. Before that she spent three years as SVP and CFO of Cisco’s Business Technology Operations Finance organization, and 13 years at Microsoft, four of them as CFO of the Server and Tools division. Finance degree from the University of Arizona, MBA from Southern Methodist University. Forbes estimates her net worth at $1.2 billion.
Analysts know her from the earnings calls; she barely appears in public otherwise. “Nvidia’s strength has always come from its people, and together with our leadership team, I am committed to building on the extraordinary foundation Jensen created over the last 33 years,” she said in her opening statement. She now runs a company worth roughly $3.8 trillion.
Two investigations on the same day
Huang has agreed to testify before Republican-led congressional committees. On Thursday evening, Democrats opened an inquiry of their own, and its target is the administration.
Rep. Richard Neal, the top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, and Sen. Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, have asked Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to preserve records. As the minority party they can ask questions but cannot compel answers.
Their letter describes the arrangement like this. President Trump agreed to sales of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China on the condition that the chips, manufactured in Taiwan, were first shipped to the United States. On arrival he added a tariff, which the authors call “effectively taking a cut of Nvidia’s sales to China through what appears to be an unconstitutional export tax system.” The Commerce Department then issued the export license.
That Nvidia and AMD agreed in August 2025 to hand 15 percent of their China chip revenue to the US government was already public. The questions that follow are the new part. Why was Megaspeed still allowed to buy chips after Lutnick had reportedly been informed by US intelligence of the suspicions about Alice Huang and of her relationship with Jensen Huang? And why were other Asian companies cleared whose listed addresses had nobody at them?
Alice Huang was an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based Nvidia customer that US officials suspect of routing advanced Nvidia chips into China. The letter also asks about Nvidia’s $26 million in donations to Trump’s projects, the ballroom among them: the export approval came after Trump knew of Huang’s “compromised position.”
Reuters reported on Thursday on a third affair, this time with an executive who reported directly to Huang.
For the AI industry this is more than a personnel change
Nvidia builds the chips this boom runs on and has lately been part of every large funding round, Anthropic included. A company whose founder just had to leave over a spying case will spend the next months negotiating export licenses, supply commitments, and equity stakes. And it will do that with a CFO at the top who cannot promise anything while the search continues. Hugging Face’s chief said the same day that he will keep fighting for open models; that he considers it necessary says enough about how much of this industry hung on one person.
Sources
- TechCrunch: Jensen Huang is out at Nvidia — who is Colette Kress, his interim replacement?
- TechCrunch: Democrats launch Nvidia investigation, write scathing letter on Huang’s ‘scheme’ with Trump
- TechCrunch: Jensen Huang was having a third affair, Reuters reports
- TechCrunch: Hugging Face CEO vows to keep fighting for open source AI after Jensen Huang’s exit
- Wall Street Journal: Jensen Huang Built Nvidia. Its Chips Made the AI Boom Possible.