[UPDATE] Jensen Huang Resigns as Nvidia's CEO

Jensen Huang has resigned as chief executive of Nvidia, ending a 33-year run at the head of the company he co-founded and turned into the central supplier of the AI boom. The board accepted his resignation on Wednesday and announced it on Thursday, 12 November. He steps down as president, chief executive and a member of the board, effective immediately, according to TechCrunch and CNBC.

Colette Kress, the company's chief financial officer, will serve as interim chief executive while the board weighs internal and external candidates for the permanent job. She keeps her roles as executive vice president and CFO in the meantime, CNN reported. Reports also say the board installed a new chair to replace Huang, who had held that title as well.

We have been following this story as it built. Last week the board opened an investigation into Huang after saying he had become the target of a foreign intelligence effort. Within days reporting suggested the board was preparing to push him out. The resignation now confirms where that was heading.

Nvidia did not give a formal reason for the departure. CNBC, citing a person familiar with the matter, reported that the board had decided to remove Huang. The backdrop is a personal scandal that spilled into the company's governance. On Sunday, Huang admitted to being unfaithful to his wife and apologised to his family and to Nvidia staff. The New York Times reported that he had a relationship with Kimberly Powell, the Nvidia executive who leads its healthcare business. The board's foreign-intelligence disclosure has not been explained in public, and China has rejected any suggestion that it was involved.

A badly timed exit

The timing is awkward. Nvidia reports quarterly earnings on 17 November, and the results are among the most closely watched numbers in the market. Kress, who has presented those numbers to investors for years, will now do so as the person running the company rather than its finance chief.

Huang's departure also lands in the middle of Nvidia's tangled relationship with China. The company has been unable to clear chips sitting in Hong Kong and has told Asian cloud providers to limit sales into the mainland. Whoever takes the permanent job inherits that balancing act along with the demand that still outstrips supply.

For a company whose identity has been fused with one founder for three decades, the question now is how much of Nvidia's edge was Huang and how much was the machine he built. The answer starts to arrive on Monday.