Jensen Huang resigns as Nvidia CEO after inquiry into ties to alleged Chinese spy

Jensen Huang has resigned as president and chief executive of Nvidia, the company he co-founded 33 years ago. Nvidia said in an SEC filing on Thursday that its board accepted his resignation on Wednesday, November 11. Chief financial officer Colette Kress is interim CEO and will stay on as CFO. Harvey C. Jones, a board member since 1993 and a former CEO of Synopsys, is now the company's first-ever board chair.

The resignation ends about three weeks of reporting on Huang's personal ties to Alice Huang, an executive at the Singapore-based AI infrastructure company Megaspeed. According to The New York Times, US officials believe she is a spy for China's Ministry of State Security. The two are not related. The affair matters well beyond one man because Nvidia makes many of the chips that the US and China are competing to control.

What the timeline shows

According to TechCrunch's timeline, the questions began with Megaspeed itself. In October 2025, the US and Singapore confirmed they were investigating the company. Officials suspected it of helping Chinese companies get around US export controls on chips. TechCrunch reports that Megaspeed bought $4.8 billion in Nvidia chips over two years. The Times reported that it rented computing power to Alibaba and other Chinese companies. In 2024, a Commerce Department official visited Megaspeed's data center in Malaysia and found Nvidia equipment still packed in boxes. That raised concern that the hardware was being shipped elsewhere rather than installed. At the time, Nvidia said Megaspeed was running "a small commercial cloud" as allowed by export rules.

The Times also reported that US officials had circulated a secret memo, drafted under Secretary of State Marco Rubio's supervision, naming Alice Huang as a Chinese intelligence asset. It said President Trump was briefed that she had formed a close relationship with Jensen Huang and did not act on it. When the Times reported that relationship in late October, Nvidia spokesperson John Rizzo said the meetings were "not unusual or unexpected" because "meetings with customers are part of a CEO's job."

The Information later reported that Alice Huang and her family had built a network of companies in China and Singapore to acquire Nvidia chips. One of them, Shanghai Century Litong, became an Nvidia-preferred cloud partner and reportedly helped buy $7.5 billion of Nvidia chips, including banned models. Bloomberg reported that Nvidia's general counsel, Tim Teter, had contacted Commerce Under Secretary Jeffrey Kessler during the 2025 probe to ask whether the administration played a role in detaining Alice Huang.

On Sunday, Huang wrote to employees that he had been "unfaithful to my wife." He did not name Alice Huang but connected the matter to "the national security concerns raised in news reports." He said the board had started an independent investigation. According to CNBC, the board later said it had hired the law firm Wachtell Lipton, and Huang denied compromising national security or company secrets. Three Republican committee chairmen, John Moolenaar, Brian Mast and Rick Crawford, asked Huang for a closed-door briefing. Moolenaar said he would likely subpoena Huang if he did not agree. On Wednesday, the Times reported a second relationship, with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice president of health care, who reports directly to him. Nvidia, Huang and Powell did not confirm it. The board accepted his resignation that day.

A company built around one person

The change is hard for Nvidia to absorb. Huang has said he has about 60 direct reports and delegates very little. TechCrunch notes that the company had no obvious successor and no succession plan. CNBC reports that the board will consider internal and external candidates. It also reports that analysts have named Kress, Ian Buck, Bryan Catanzaro, Michael Kagan and Bill Dally as possible internal choices. "The Board has full confidence in Colette and the leadership team," Jones said, according to CNBC.

The market reacted sharply. TechCrunch reported that Nvidia shares fell nearly 12 percent in early trading on Thursday and more than 19 percent since Friday. CNBC put the opening drop at more than 13 percent and said the company had fallen below a $4 trillion market value. CNBC also reported falls in other AI infrastructure stocks: CoreWeave about 9 percent, Nebius about 16 percent and IREN 6.6 percent. Nvidia still plans to report fiscal third-quarter results on November 17.

The US-China dimension

Huang was close to the Trump administration. He has repeatedly argued that Nvidia should be allowed to sell more in China. He joined Trump on a trip to China in May. As recently as Sunday, Trump said Huang should remain CEO. US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told CNBC that "Nvidia is a structurally important company" and that the AI buildout will continue.

The Megaspeed case points to the core weakness of export controls. They work only as well as chipmakers can track where their products end up. Huang's departure does not settle that question. A Justice Department investigation of Megaspeed is ongoing, according to the Times, and Congress has said it wants to know how far US security was put at risk.

What it means for work

Nvidia's chips run much of the world's AI training and inference. Leadership changes there affect the cloud providers, labs and data center builders that plan around its products. A company whose CEO handled about 60 direct reports now has to spread those decisions across more people, under an interim leader who is also running finance. For compliance and sales teams across the chip industry, the case will likely bring closer checks on who resells compute and where hardware is actually installed. Open questions include who the permanent CEO will be, what the Wachtell Lipton investigation finds, and whether Washington tightens rules on chip sales to intermediaries in Southeast Asia.