Nvidia's Huang exit puts a $99B AI investment book in a CFO's hands
Jensen Huang's resignation leaves interim CEO Colette Kress in charge of Nvidia and of roughly $99 billion in investments that help fund AI labs, neoclouds and data centers. Earnings arrive Tuesday.
Nvidia's board accepted Jensen Huang's resignation as president, chief executive and director on November 11, ending the only leadership the chipmaker has had since 1993 and handing its sprawling web of AI investments to chief financial officer Colette Kress, who will run the company as interim CEO, according to an SEC filing.
The company announced the change on November 12. Kress, 59, has been CFO since September 2013 and keeps that job while the board searches for a permanent chief, considering internal and external candidates. The board also named Harvey C. Jones, a director since 1993 and a former Synopsys CEO, as Nvidia's first-ever board chair. The release carried no statement from Huang.
Why Huang left
The resignation followed a week of reports about Huang's personal life. He told employees in a memo over the weekend that he had been unfaithful to his wife, after reports that he had a relationship with an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based cloud provider and Nvidia customer, whom The New York Times reported was allegedly passing information to China's Ministry of State Security, The Verge reported. Nvidia's board opened an investigation on Sunday, according to CNBC.
On Wednesday, The New York Times reported a second relationship, with an Nvidia vice president who reported directly to Huang. The board met late that night and accepted his resignation, effective immediately. On Thursday, Reuters reported a third relationship with another, unnamed Nvidia employee.
The investment book Kress inherits
For startups and investors, the bigger question is what happens to the capital Nvidia has pushed into the AI ecosystem under Huang. At the end of its second quarter, Nvidia reported about $99 billion in investments, another $25 billion in commitments and $36 billion in cloud service commitments, TechCrunch reported. Those cloud deals are arrangements in which Nvidia agrees to buy compute from AI cloud operators, which helps them finance the GPUs and data center gear they buy from Nvidia.
The portfolio spans the stack. TechCrunch tallied $2 billion each into neoclouds CoreWeave and Nebius this year, $30 billion into OpenAI, $10 billion into Anthropic, a backing of Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab tied to at least 1 gigawatt of Vera Rubin systems, and $3.5 billion into MediaTek for custom AI chips. Nvidia has also signed up to provide up to $105 billion in credit guarantees for an OpenAI data center campus in Ohio, according to the same report. Venture Block has covered how much of the AI buildout now leans on such backstops, including Google's credit support for Anthropic's Kentucky leases.
The board's chair said it expects "operations, customer commitments and product roadmap to continue without interruption." Kress has led Nvidia's finance organization since 2013, which gives partners a familiar counterpart. What she cannot inherit is Huang's personal role as Nvidia's dealmaker and public advocate for AI spending, a role that also put him at the center of Nvidia's lobbying on chip export controls and its relationship with the Trump administration.
Market reaction
Nvidia shares fell nearly 12% in early trading on Thursday before closing about 4% lower, and slipped another 2.01% on Friday, leaving the company below $4 trillion in market value for the first time since July 2025, CNBC reported. The stock fell 12.75% for the week, its sixth straight weekly decline and its longest such streak since 2012.
The selling spread to companies that depend on Nvidia's financing. On Thursday CoreWeave fell about 9%, Nebius about 16% and IREN 6.6%, according to TechCrunch.
A company built around one founder
Huang ran an unusually flat organization with around 60 direct reports and no named successor, TechCrunch noted. He is Nvidia's largest individual shareholder with about 3.5% of the stock but has no super-voting shares, so the board could remove him at any time. Names floated for the permanent job include Kress, Apple hardware chief Johny Srouji, Nvidia vice president Ian Buck, AMD CEO Lisa Su and Arm CEO Rene Haas, according to The Verge.
The transition lands while Nvidia already faces regulatory scrutiny of its dealmaking, including the Justice Department's questions about its $12.9 billion Hugging Face deal. China accounted for about $7.9 billion, or roughly 8%, of Nvidia's revenue in its second quarter, TechCrunch reported.
The first test of the new leadership comes on Tuesday, November 17, when Nvidia reports third-quarter fiscal 2027 results at about 1:20 p.m. Pacific time, followed by its earnings call at 2 p.m.
