Nvidia Hands a $4 Trillion Machine to Its CFO

Nvidia's board has accepted the resignation of Jen-Hsun (Jensen) Huang as president, chief executive, and board member, effective immediately, ending a 33-year run at the company he co-founded. The board announced the move on November 12, a day after the acceptance took effect, and named no permanent successor. Instead, the $4 trillion chipmaker is now run by its chief financial officer, Colette Kress, on an interim basis while the board conducts a search that includes both internal and external candidates, according to the company's filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The transfer of power is stark in its simplicity: the world's largest chipmaker by value, the engine of the AI buildout, has handed its top job to its finance chief. In its statement, the company said the board expects operations, customer commitments, and the product roadmap to continue without interruption. Whether that confidence survives contact with the market was tested within hours.

A CFO suddenly carrying two jobs

Kress has been Nvidia's executive vice president and chief financial officer since September 2013, more than a decade in which she became the public face of the company's financial reporting and the translator of its data-center boom to Wall Street. She spent nearly 25 years in finance roles at technology companies including Cisco and Microsoft before joining Nvidia, TechCrunch reported. She now holds both the CFO role and the interim CEO title, a dual burden that puts her in front of analysts on Tuesday's earnings call while also running the company.

The board also restructured its own leadership. Harvey C. Jones, a director since 1993 and the former Synopsys chief executive and executive chairman, was appointed Nvidia's first-ever chair of the board. The creation of the role, after more than three decades without one, signals a board formalizing governance control at the exact moment a founder-led era ends.

The market's verdict came fast

Nvidia shares fell as much as 14% at Thursday's opening bell, pared the loss through the session, and closed down 4.34%, erasing roughly $182 billion of market value in a single day. The week has been worse: about $490 billion in value gone over five sessions, leaving the company valued around $4 trillion, still off almost 40% from last year's record highs after the stock had fallen nearly 10% through Tuesday's close before a Wednesday bounce.

The rotation told its own story. Broadcom and Advanced Micro Devices each climbed nearly 6% to lead S&P 500 advancers as investors weighed rivals, while Intel, Marvell, and Micron each fell roughly 2%. The Nasdaq Composite, S&P 500, and Dow each closed 0.4% lower, a contained session by the standards of the Nvidia-led week.

Companies Nvidia itself invests in did not get the same treatment. CoreWeave fell 7%, Nebius dropped 17%, and Super Micro Computer tumbled 11% after Bloomberg reported the Justice Department is examining whether Alice Huang, the woman alleged to have had the relationship with Jensen Huang, was involved in smuggling Supermicro products into China. Per the New York Times, Alice Huang is not related to Jensen Huang.

A founder-shaped institution

Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and had led it as chief executive ever since, a 33-year run that bound the company's customer relationships, its roadmap evangelism, and its capital-cycle deals to a single personality. The board's move followed a week of reporting: The Wall Street Journal reported the board was preparing to dismiss Huang, The New York Times reported an affair with an Nvidia executive, and Huang had publicly admitted marital infidelity days earlier.

The succession problem now collides with a Washington problem. Three House committee chairs, Brian Mast of Foreign Affairs, John Moolenaar of the Select Committee on China, and Rick Crawford of Intelligence, sent letters on November 12 requesting Huang, Nvidia general counsel Tim Teter, and Commerce Under Secretary Jeffrey Kessler appear before Congress over national-security questions tied to Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and Megaspeed. A first letter had sought a response by November 11. Mast said Huang has agreed to appear in a closed-door briefing, likely under oath. Huang had been one of the industry's loudest advocates for selling advanced chips to China while hawkish lawmakers pushed for tighter restrictions, a debate that now continues without him.

Nvidia reports third-quarter fiscal 2027 results on Tuesday, November 17, at approximately 1:20 p.m. PT, with the earnings call at 2 p.m. PT, as previously scheduled, and it will be Kress, not Huang, who runs it. The machine is built. Whether the institution can run without its person will get its first evidence there.