Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigns amid spy scandal

• The Nvidia board of directors announced that Jensen Huang resigned as president, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), and a member of the board on November 12.

• Huang’s resignation followed revelations that he had an affair with a woman accused of spying for China.

• Colette Kress, current executive vice president and Chief Financial Officer of Nvidia, will serve as interim CEO. 

• The board has initiated a search for a permanent CEO and will consider internal and external candidates.

Who is Jensen Huang?

• Jensen Huang has been one of the poster boys for the AI revolution because his company’s chips are essential for the technology. 

• He was born in Taipei, Taiwan on February 17, 1963.

• Huang moved to the United States as a child. 

• He earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Oregon State University.

• He received his master’s degree in electrical engineering at Stanford in 1992.

• In 1993, Huang and two engineers named Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem gathered at a restaurant in San Jose, California and discussed building a computer chip that would make graphics for video games faster and more realistic. 

• That led to the founding of Nvidia.

• The company’s invention of the graphics processing unit (GPU) in 1999 sparked the growth of the PC gaming market, redefined computer graphics, and ignited the era of modern AI. 

• Nvidia’s chip designs have been at the heart of major technology trends from video games to self-driving cars to cloud computing and AI.

• Nvidia is now driving the platform shift of accelerated computing and generative AI.

• In October 2025, Nvidia became the world’s first $5 trillion company in market value.

• The milestone underscores the company’s swift transformation from a niche graphics-chip designer into the backbone of the global AI industry, turning Huang into a Silicon Valley icon.

What led to the resignation of Jensen Huang as Nvidia CEO?

• Nvidia CEO Huang faces a board probe into whether he was the target of a foreign intelligence effort after a media report linked him to a Chinese businesswoman accused of passing information to Beijing.

• Huang had a relationship with Alice Huang, a former executive of Singapore-based company Megaspeed, who US authorities investigated and concluded was a Chinese intelligence asset.

• The US has been investigating Megaspeed over suspicions that it helped Beijing gain access to Nvidia’s advanced AI chips that are barred from shipment to China.

• US President Donald Trump said the FBI was looking into Huang’s affair with a Chinese businesswoman.

• China’s foreign ministry has said the spy accusations are “groundless”.