Nvidia Loses Jensen Huang as CEO; Stock Down Over $300 Billion

Nvidia has wiped out more than $300 billion in market value since Friday, and on Thursday its shares fell another 11% in premarket trading after Jensen Huang resigned as president and chief executive.

The resignation, disclosed in a regulatory filing, follows Huang's admission of a romantic affair with an alleged Chinese spy — a revelation that has triggered a U.S. national security crisis. Nvidia's board accepted the resignation on Wednesday. The company did not say what, if any, severance or transition terms apply. That silence leaves open the question of how clean the break really is.

Chief financial officer and executive vice president Colette Kress will serve as interim CEO while the board searches for a permanent successor. Kress keeps her CFO role, meaning one person now holds the two most powerful financial and operational jobs at a company worth hundreds of billions of dollars — an arrangement that concentrates risk at the worst possible moment. The board gave no timeline for the search.

Nvidia's board also named Harvey Jones as the company's first-ever chair of the board of directors. Jones, a managing partner of Square Wave Ventures and former CEO of Synopsys, has sat on Nvidia's board since 1993 — a 32-year tenure that predates the company's rise into the AI era. Whether an insider chair brings stability or entrenches the status quo remains to be seen.

"Jensen's contributions to NVIDIA are profound. NVIDIA is one of the most consequential technology companies in the world. The Board and the company thank Jensen for his immeasurable contributions to the company and the industry," the company said in a statement.

Notably absent from that statement: any mention of the affair, the alleged spy, or the national security fallout. The praise is warm; the explanation is not offered.

What happens to Nvidia's $160 billion investment machine?

The stakes extend far beyond one executive. Huang personally drove Nvidia's strategy of using its balance sheet to bankroll the AI boom — financing the very customers who buy its chips.

The numbers are large by any measure. As of the end of its second quarter, Nvidia reported $99 billion worth of investments plus another $25 billion of commitments. On top of that sit $36 billion in cloud service commitments: arrangements that help AI cloud operators finance the GPUs and data center equipment they buy from Nvidia, with the chipmaker promising to buy compute from them and potentially take a share of their revenue. In plain terms, Nvidia has been financing demand for its own product.

The company has also invested directly in so-called neoclouds — the firms handling much of the AI processing workload:

• $2 billion into CoreWeave in January
• $2 billion into Nebius in March
• Reported consideration of serving as guarantor for Nscale's planned West Virginia data center project

The largest single exposure sits elsewhere. Nvidia has signed up to provide up to $105 billion worth of credit guarantees for an OpenAI data center campus in Ohio. That figure is roughly the annual GDP of a mid-sized European economy, and it could leave Nvidia with substantial losses if the project runs into trouble — a risk that now falls to an interim CEO.

Under Huang, Nvidia also lobbied Washington to relax potential rules around AI and data center regulation, according to the company's record. Whether Kress or a permanent successor maintains that posture is unknown.

Why Huang's exit matters for the AI industry

Huang's departure raises immediate questions about the future of Nvidia's sprawling AI investments, which have helped fund everything from startups developing new technologies to the enormous data centers needed to run them. The implications for the AI and data center industries are vast, given how active Huang — and by extension Nvidia — has been in furthering the AI boom.

The risk cuts both ways. Startups and cloud operators that built their plans around Nvidia's capital may now face a counterparty that is leaderless, distracted, and under national security scrutiny. Nvidia has promised continuity by keeping Kress in both roles; it has not explained who, if anyone, will champion the investment strategy Huang ran personally.

For now, the market is rendering its verdict: $300 billion in market cap gone in under a week. The company said the story is developing, and the search for a permanent CEO — plus clarity on the fate of $160 billion in investments and commitments — will define Nvidia's next chapter.