Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Resigns Over Espionage Scandal

Jensen Huang is out as Nvidia's chief executive, effective immediately, after reports of an affair with a woman suspected of being a Chinese spy. The US chipmaker announced his departure on Wednesday. CFO Colette Kress will run the company on an interim basis while the board searches internally and externally for a permanent successor, the company said.

Huang isn't just leaving the top job. He will also exit the board of directors. He co-founded Nvidia and remains its fourth-largest investor with a stake of roughly 3.61 percent.

The board had already met on Wednesday to discuss dismissing him. That same day, reports surfaced alleging Huang had also engaged in an extramarital affair with a senior executive reporting directly to him inside the company.

What does this change for Nvidia?

Leadership, for now, rests with Kress, a finance chief stepping into the CEO chair on short notice. A permanent successor hasn't been identified. The search will cover both internal and external candidates, according to the company.

The backstory unfolded in two stages. Days earlier, when only one affair had been reported — the one involving the Chinese woman — Nvidia had declared that Huang would continue leading the company without interruption. That position collapsed on Wednesday, when the New York Times reported a second relationship with a subordinate Nvidia executive. The paper identified her as Kimberly Powell, the vice president responsible for the company's healthcare business, citing five employees.

Why the case is politically explosive

The woman at the center of the first affair, who originates from China, worked at times for a company called Megaspeed. That firm had been suspected of serving as a shell through which Nvidia chips could be funneled into China.

US authorities are investigating the suspicion that, through the affair, the government in Beijing gained access to cutting-edge AI chips whose export to China is banned. Since 2022, the United States has used export controls to restrict China's access to these technologies, aiming to slow the country's technological and military rise.

The stakes are hard to overstate. Nvidia dominates the market for specialized chips that are essential for training artificial intelligence models such as OpenAI's ChatGPT. That puts the company at the center of the technological rivalry between the United States and China.

Huang also has a direct line to US President Donald Trump, a connection that adds another layer of political sensitivity to the affair.

Was Huang a target?

Nvidia's supervisory board is currently investigating whether Huang himself was the target of a foreign intelligence operation. That question — victim or compromised — remains open.

What's settled is the immediate corporate outcome: the co-founder who built Nvidia into the dominant supplier of AI training chips is gone from both the executive suite and the boardroom, and an interim CEO is holding the wheel of the most strategically important semiconductor company in the Western AI supply chain.