Jensen Huang delivers a keynote speech at the Nvidia Berlin GPU Technology Conference on October 21, 2026.
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Jensen Huang, CEO of chipmaker giant Nvidia, will step down from his role, the company’s board of directors announced Thursday.
The decision comes days after the company took the extraordinary step of launching an investigation following news reports alleging that Huang had had an extramarital affair with one of the company’s clients, who U.S. intelligence officials concluded had been recruited by China’s top spy agency, according to the New York Times. NPR has not independently confirmed those reports.
In an email sent to Nvidia staff on Sunday, Huang admitted to cheating on his wife and said he would cooperate with the investigation.
The company’s stock price fell sharply on Wednesday, after the New York Times reported that Huang had had a second affair, this time with an Nvidia executive who reported to him.
Nvidia did not immediately respond to a request for comment from NPR.
Huang was widely viewed as one of America’s most important business leaders. Nvidia dominates the market for chips used to train and run artificial intelligence. Huang also had President Trump’s attention on AI policy, and Trump even called Huang’s phone in September while Huang was on stage during a conference.
The scandal that brought down Huang grew rapidly over the past two weeks. He New York Times reported in late October that Huang had a close relationship with a Chinese woman at a Singapore-based company that bought Nvidia chips. Citing unnamed sources, he said U.S. intelligence officials believed she had been recruited by the Chinese government to spy on it and possibly try to influence policy. NPR has not independently confirmed this report.
A trickle of spoonfuls followed, from the Times and other means, suggesting that the relationship was romanticthat senior Trump administration officials knew about the allegations some time ago and that Huang had had a second affair.
China’s Foreign Ministry has said the espionage accusations are baseless and part of a smear campaign against China.
What’s next for Nvidia?
Huang’s departure launches Nvidia into uncharted territory.
Huang’s relationship with the alleged Chinese agent and what the Trump administration knew about it will likely be the subject of an investigation when Democrats take control of Congress in January.
“We should all be extremely concerned about this, and the fact that the White House knew about this for weeks, maybe months, is also very concerning,” said Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, in an interview with NPR.
The company’s chief financial officer, Colette Kress, has been named interim CEO. The board said in its statement that they would conduct a full search for a new chief executive and would consider both internal and external candidates.
“There’s no obvious replacement,” said Stephen Witt, author of a book about Nvidia called The thinking machine. “It’s not even clear that Nvidia could be the same kind of company without Jensen. I have a hard time imagining what Nvidia would be like without Jensen.”
Nvidia still plans to report its quarterly earnings on Tuesday.
Huang was one of the longest-serving chief executives in American corporate history, taking over after launching the company with partners over bottomless cups of coffee at a Denny’s restaurant in San Jose, California, 33 years ago. Nvidia began manufacturing specialized chips for creating 3D graphics for computers that would become known as graphics processing units or GPUs.
He was the face of Nvidia and a rare celebrity, giving countless speeches and interviews in his trademark leather jacket, or posing for selfies with fans.
Huang was also the driving force of the company. Under his leadership, Nvidia made a big early bet on artificial intelligence, investing heavily to transform its niche graphics chips into general-purpose processing units that were ideal for the volume of calculations needed to create AI.
That gamble would pay off in spades as GPUs became the chip of choice for AI creators. When AI burst into the public consciousness in late 2022 with the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT (a chatbot trained and running on Nvidia chips), the company was worth around $400 billion. Today, it is valued at more than $4 trillion, one of the most valuable in the world, and dominates the GPU market.
But analysts say that despite Huang’s visionary management of the business, he had a blind spot for succession and had not articulated a clear plan, at least publicly.
In a mid-October Bloomberg interview, Huang was vague about succession plans. “I really hope that the company’s next CEO is already at the company, but in 20 years, I hope to stay healthy and still make a living.”
Huang’s adult children, Spencer and Madison Huang, they both work at nvidia. When asked about rumors that Madison could be in line to succeed him, he paused and told Bloomberg: “If that’s their aspiration, Spencer or Madison, they have to earn it. And it’s really, really hard work. It requires a lot of sacrifice.”
Daniel Newman, chief executive of Futurum Group, a technology research firm, said the company will inevitably be different without Huang and that its future success is unclear.
“They’ve always had Jensen as kind of the visionary at the helm,” he said. “I don’t think he’s replaceable.”
Katie McQue contributed to this story.
