Jensen Huang has resigned as president and chief executive of Nvidia and has left its board, effective immediately, the company said Thursday, Nov. 12. Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress, 59, is now interim CEO while the board looks for a permanent replacement.
The board accepted Huang's resignation on Wednesday, Nov. 11, according to the company's filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Neither the filing nor the announcement Nvidia attached to it gives a reason for his departure.
What Nvidia announced
Kress has been Nvidia's chief financial officer since September 2013, after nearly 25 years in finance roles at technology companies including Cisco and Microsoft, and she will keep that job while she runs the company. The board said it will consider both internal and external candidates for the permanent job.
The board also named Harvey C. Jones, 73, as its chair, the first time Nvidia has had one. Jones has been a director since 1993, runs a private family office called Square Wave Ventures and is a former chief executive and executive chairman of the chip design software company Synopsys.
"The Board has full confidence in Colette and the leadership team, and we expect the company's operations, customer commitments and product roadmap to continue without interruption," Jones said in the announcement.
Kress said she was committed to "building on the extraordinary foundation Jensen created over the last 33 years." The company thanked Huang for what it called his "immeasurable contributions to the company and the industry."
How it got here
The resignation comes four days after Nvidia's board said it was opening an independent investigation following reports that Huang had been the target of a foreign intelligence effort. At the time, the board said it had "no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised" and that it had confidence in Huang.
The same day, Nov. 8, Nvidia published an email Huang sent to employees in which he said he had been unfaithful to his wife, apologized and said he would cooperate fully with the investigation. On Nov. 10, the board's independent members said they had hired Joon H. Kim, a former acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, and his firm, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, to run it.
Thursday's filing does not say whether that investigation has finished or what it found. Edit USA covered the investigation and Huang's email on Nov. 8 and the House request for a briefing on Nov. 7.
What comes next
Nvidia said it will still report its third-quarter results on Tuesday, Nov. 17, at about 1:20 p.m. Pacific, with its earnings call at 2 p.m. Pacific. That call will be Kress's first as interim CEO.
The board has not given a timeline for naming a permanent chief executive.
