Nvidia names Colette Kress as CEO after Jensen Huang steps down

Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) has handed its top job to finance chief Colette Kress after co-founder Jensen Huang stepped down as chief executive and left the board.

The company made the announcement on Thursday, bringing an end to 33 years of history where Nvidia evolved from a graphics chip firm to a $4 trillion giant that finds itself at the core of the AI spending rush.

Jensen’s exit follows reports of two affairs, claims that he has been working with Chinese spies, and suspicions of violating U.S. regulations for chip sales. The shares of Nvidia lost 10% value prior to Wall Street’s opening.

Colette inherits a company facing questions far beyond the boardroom

But for Colette, convincing the investors is not the first thing to do because there is something else happening on the other side as well.

According to Reuters, on Tuesday, Nvidia’s board brought in Wachtell Lipton to look into the allegations connected to Jensen and Alice Jensen. Alice is working for Megaspeed, a Chinese firm that buys things from Nvidia. It has been alleged that US intelligence has accused her of spying on behalf of China.

Jensen has denied passing along company secrets or doing anything that threatened US national security. On Sunday, he admitted that he had been “unfaithful to my wife,” but did not provide an account of what happened with Alice.

Soon after, a second report emerged regarding a different relationship, this time regarding Kimberly Powell, the vice president of healthcare at Nvidia. Subsequent reports indicated that directors met to discuss the next steps for the company.

In the meantime, reports have been pointing out how businesses in Singapore and Malaysia could be used to bypass American restrictions on exporting advanced chips to China.

The man behind Nvidia’s AI network leaves a political mess, too

Jensen was not just the guy on stage launching processors in a leather jacket. He had a personal touch when it came to networking with politicians and tech CEOs and founders, where he converted meetings into business where Nvidia chips would be used in the next generation of AI firms. And to us shareholders, he was simply ‘Jensen’ and his emails always had a warm, friendly touch to them.

The power Jensen held in Washington increased with the interest of President Donald Trump in making America dominant in the area of artificial intelligence. Jensen lobbied for open-source AI to remain accessible and asked for permission to sell more powerful computers to China.

The two appeared together during a May trip to China. That same month, Trump described Jensen on social media as “The Great Jensen Huang.” At August’s All-In Summit, Jensen answered a call from Trump while speaking about AI regulation and safety, then let the room hear it over the speakers. Trump told him, “I’m with you all the way.”

That access could have become much more complicated regardless of the scandal. Democrats were positioned to take both chambers of Congress, with investigations into Nvidia-related matters already being discussed. A change in congressional leadership would bring fresh scrutiny to the chipmaker’s dealings and political relationships.

There is also the question of what Nvidia looks like without the executive who helped make its products essential to the AI race. After OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late 2022, companies rushed to purchase the graphics processing units used to develop and run large models. Nvidia’s stock climbed roughly fourteenfold from that point, despite the recent retreat in AI-linked shares and the selloff surrounding Jensen.

Nvidia’s reach now goes well beyond selling chips to the biggest cloud-computing providers. It puts money into smaller AI firms, helps support equipment financing and leases, and works with businesses that are simultaneously its customers and partners. Those financial ties have made the company a central player in how AI infrastructure gets built.

One early example of Jensen’s hands-on approach came in 2016, when he personally delivered Nvidia’s first AI supercomputer to Elon Musk for a then-little-known research organization called OpenAI. Musk now runs SpaceX, an aerospace and AI company that buys substantial amounts of Nvidia hardware.