Jensen Huang has resigned as Nvidia's chief executive, president and board member, effective immediately, ending 33 years at the head of the company he co-founded. Nvidia's board announced the resignation on Thursday, 12 November, a day after it met to consider removing him.

Chief financial officer Colette Kress has taken over as interim chief executive and will continue as CFO. Nvidia did not give a reason for Huang's departure.

The board has also named Harvey Jones, a former chief executive of chip design software company Synopsys and a long-serving Nvidia director, as its first-ever board chair. It is searching for a permanent chief executive and will consider both internal and external candidates.

"Jensen's contributions to Nvidia are profound," the board said, thanking him for his "immeasurable contributions to the company and the industry". Kress said she was "committed to building on the extraordinary foundation Jensen created over the last 33 years".

The resignation came 4 days after the board announced an independent investigation into reports that Huang had been the target of a foreign intelligence effort, at the time expressing confidence in him. Huang then admitted to an extramarital affair with a woman US intelligence alleges is a Chinese spy, and on Wednesday the New York Times reported that he also had an affair with an executive who reports to him. Huang has reportedly agreed to testify before Congress, where lawmakers have raised national security questions.

Huang, 63, had about 60 people reporting directly to him, and Nvidia had no publicly named successor. The scandal pushed Nvidia's share price to an 8-month low this week, and analyst Dan Ives of Yorkville Ives has estimated Nvidia could be worth 25% to 30% less without him.

CBS News reported that Kress said the company's focus will be on "serving our customers, partners, developers and shareholders". The Globe and Mail described the departure as leaving the AI industry without its biggest champion. Before the resignation, Harvard Business School professor David Yoffie told CBS News: "Jensen is Nvidia. And if he has done something wrong and he needs to be removed, and they have no successors, that's a terrible outcome."

Nvidia now has to show investors and customers that the company at the centre of the AI boom can run without the person most identified with it. That is what key-person risk looks like at the largest scale: no clear successor, a chief executive with dozens of people reporting straight to him, and an interim leader drawn from the finance team while the search begins.

For South African founders, the lesson is practical, not dramatic: spread decision-making, document how the business runs, and have an answer to who leads if you cannot, long before you need it.

The governance contrast is also worth noting. Nvidia's board could act quickly because Huang did not control the votes, while at Anthropic, the founders will keep 51% of them after its listing. And with Nvidia's leadership change landing during this month's wider AI sell-off, it adds to the pressure on a market already nervous about AI valuations.

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