Jensen Huang Resigns: The Nvidia CEO Job Is Officially Open

Updated November 12, 2026 with Nvidia's official announcement.

On November 12, 2026, Nvidia officially announced a CEO transition: Jensen Huang has resigned as President, Chief Executive Officer and member of the Board, effective immediately. Huang co-founded the company in 1993 and led it for 33 years, taking it from a graphics-chip startup to the center of the global AI build-out.

The CEO seat isn't empty. Nvidia moved straight to an interim leadership structure.

What Nvidia announced

• Interim CEO: Colette Kress. Nvidia's EVP and CFO has agreed to serve as Interim CEO. She keeps the CFO role until a permanent CEO is named. Kress joined Nvidia in September 2013 and has led its finance organization since. Before that she spent nearly 25 years in finance roles at technology companies including Cisco and Microsoft.
• First-ever Chair of the Board: Harvey C. Jones. Nvidia created the role for the first time. Jones has more than 30 years as an entrepreneur, technology executive and venture investor, including serving as CEO and Executive Chairman of Synopsys.
• Permanent CEO search. No permanent successor has been named. The board will consider internal and external candidates.
• Business as usual. Speaking for the board, Jones said it has full confidence in Kress and the leadership team, and expects operations, customer commitments and the product roadmap to continue without interruption.
• Earnings on schedule. Nvidia will report Q3 fiscal 2027 results on Tuesday, November 17, at about 1:20 p.m. PT, followed by the earnings call at 2 p.m. PT.

Kress said she is committed to building on the foundation Huang created over 33 years, with a focus on customers, partners, developers and shareholders. The board thanked Huang for his contributions to Nvidia and the industry. The release does not say whether Huang will have any role going forward.

How we got here

The announcement followed a week of fast-moving events:

• Early November: Reports alleged a relationship between Huang and an executive of Megaspeed, a company under investigation for allegedly smuggling export-controlled AI GPUs into China. U.S. intelligence agencies reportedly suspect her of being a Chinese intelligence asset.
• November 8: Huang admitted to staff that he had been unfaithful to his wife and apologized company-wide. The board opened an independent investigation, hiring the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.
• November 11: The New York Times reported a second relationship, with a senior Nvidia executive who reported directly to Huang. That appears to conflict with Nvidia's code of conduct. The board met into the evening to decide his future.
• November 12: The board announced Huang's resignation.

Markets reacted hard: Nvidia shares fell around 10% in premarket trading and more than 11% after the announcement.

Who could get the permanent job

Analysts have floated several internal names: Kress herself, Jay Puri (Worldwide Field Operations), Ian Buck (VP of Hyperscale and HPC, and one of the people behind CUDA) and Bryan Catanzaro (applied deep learning research). Huang had said he hoped the next CEO would come from inside the company. The board hasn't ruled out an outside hire.

Why this matters for IIoT and OT

Nvidia isn't just a data center story. Its Jetson edge modules, Omniverse digital twins, Isaac robotics stack and Metropolis vision platform are increasingly part of factory and plant architectures. The board says the roadmap continues unchanged, and products like Vera Rubin were planned long ago. Still, the next permanent CEO will decide how hard Nvidia keeps pushing into industrial AI, edge and robotics.

For engineers and integrators, a few things to watch:

• November 17 earnings call. It's the first one without Huang, so listen for anything on edge, robotics and Omniverse priorities.
• Partner programs and pricing for edge hardware and Omniverse licensing.
• China export policy, already under scrutiny and now with a national-security angle.
• Reorgs and hiring. Leadership transitions often bring reorganizations. Some teams freeze and others speed up. If you work in industrial AI, keep an eye on where Nvidia's robotics and edge groups land.

We'll update this post as the search develops.

Sources: Nvidia press release, "NVIDIA Announces CEO Transition" (November 12, 2026); reporting by Tom's Hardware, CNN, NBC News and CNBC (November 11–12, 2026).