NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang steps down after 18.5% stock drop

Jensen Huang co-founded NVIDIA in 1993 and built it into a $4 trillion company whose GPUs and software architectures underpin much of advanced computing and AI. His departure follows a week in which the stock fell about 18.5%, and his statement on Nov. 8 acknowledged the affairs and supported an independent board investigation into national security concerns raised in news reports.

The company moved quickly to signal continuity, naming CFO Collette Kress as interim CEO and Harvey C. Jones as first board chair. Kress, who joined NVIDIA in September 2013 after nearly 25 years in finance roles at Cisco and Microsoft, said she is committed to building on the foundation Huang created over the last 33 years. Jones said the board has full confidence in Kress and expects operations, customer commitments, and product roadmap to continue without interruption.

The leadership change comes as NVIDIA remains active in robotics, having this week introduced GR00T 2 and Isaac Lab 3.0, and with its planned $12.9 billion acquisition of Hugging Face's open AI development platform likely to receive more scrutiny. Huang's exit could slow AI-related deals and lead to greater government scrutiny of trade deals, according to Reuters and Morningstar, as efforts continue to build sovereign AI and robotics.