Just now, we witnessed a historic moment.
On the evening of November 12, the NVIDIA Board of Directors announced the final decision: co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang resigned, and Colette Kress will serve as the interim CEO.
In addition, NVIDIA has appointed its first-ever Board Chairman: Harvey C. Jones.
NVIDIA's new Chief Executive Officer Colette Kress will not only serve as the interim CEO but will also continue to hold the position of Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer (CFO). Following Jensen Huang's resignation on November 12, 2026, the board has asked her to serve as CEO until a formal successor is determined, with the search considering both internal and external candidates. She joined NVIDIA in September 2013 and has since been in charge of the company's financial operations, overseeing its transformation from a graphics chip manufacturer to a leading AI computing powerhouse.
Colette Kress
had nearly 25 years of financial management experience in the technology industry prior to joining NVIDIA. Her career began at semiconductor company Texas Instruments, where she worked in finance for eight years; from 1997 to 2010, she served at Microsoft, starting as CFO of the Servers and Tools Division in 2006; in 2010, she joined Cisco as a Senior Vice President and CFO of the Business Technology and Operations Finance Department. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Finance from the University of Arizona and an MBA from Southern Methodist University.
Harvey C. Jones, NVIDIA's first Board Chairman, is the first person to hold this position in the company's 33-year history.
After Jensen Huang's resignation on November 12, 2026, the board elected him as Chairman and asked him to represent the board in supporting the interim CEO Colette Kress and the management team. Jones has been a board member since the company's founding in 1993 and is one of the longest-serving members. He previously served on the Audit Committee and the Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee.
Jones is a veteran in the EDA (Electronic Design Automation) industry in Silicon Valley, holding the triple roles of entrepreneur, technology company executive, and active venture capitalist. In 1981, he co-founded Daisy Systems, a computer-aided engineering company, and served as President and CEO until 1987; from 1987 to 1998, he led Synopsys, first as CEO for seven years and then as Executive Chairman; afterward, he co-founded the processor IP company Tensilica. Since 2004, he has served as a managing partner at the private investment firm Square Wave Ventures. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from Georgetown University and a Master's degree in Management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The following is the full text of NVIDIA's announcement:
NVIDIA (NASDAQ stock code: NVDA) Board of Directors announced today that Jensen Huang has resigned from his positions as President, Chief Executive Officer, and Board Member, effective immediately.
NVIDIA's current Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Colette Kress, has agreed to serve as the interim Chief Executive Officer. While a permanent successor is appointed, Kress will continue to serve as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. The board has initiated the formal selection process for the permanent CEO, considering both internal and external candidates.
Since joining NVIDIA in September 2013, Kress has served as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. During her tenure, she led the company's financial organization and played a key role in NVIDIA's growth and evolution. Before joining NVIDIA, Kress had nearly 25 years of financial roles at leading technology companies such as Cisco and Microsoft.
The board has appointed Harvey C. Jones as the company's first-ever Board Chairman. Jones has over 30 years of experience as an entrepreneur, technology executive, and active venture capitalist, including his tenure as CEO and Executive Chairman of Synopsys.
“Colette has helped NVIDIA through an extraordinary period of growth, and she has a deep understanding of our business, customers, operations, and financial performance,” said Harvey Jones, NVIDIA’s chairman. “She has been supported by a seasoned leadership team that has played a crucial role in executing NVIDIA’s strategy and advancing its technology roadmap. The board has confidence in Colette and the leadership team, and we expect the company’s operations, commitments to customers, and product roadmap to continue uninterrupted.”
“NVIDIA’s strength has always come from its employees. I will work with the leadership team to continue building on the extraordinary foundation that Jensen has established over the past 33 years,” said Colette Kress, NVIDIA’s interim CEO and CFO. “We will continue to advance the initiatives that have made NVIDIA a leader in accelerated computing and artificial intelligence, seizing future opportunities. Our focus remains on serving our customers, partners, developers, and shareholders.”
Jensen’s contributions to NVIDIA are profound. NVIDIA is one of the most influential technology companies in the world. The board and company thank Jensen for the immeasurable contributions he has made to the company and the entire industry.
NVIDIA will release its Q3 2027 financial results as originally scheduled at approximately 1:20 p.m. Pacific Time on Thursday, November 17, followed by a financial results conference call at 2:00 p.m. Pacific Time.
The soul of NVIDIA
There is no doubt that Jensen Huang is the soul of NVIDIA.
His most outstanding achievement is the continuous drive of NVIDIA across different markets over a 33-year period, from game graphics chips, to general-purpose accelerated computing, and then to AI data centers. This requires sound technical judgment, long-term investment, and effective business execution. Huang has long taken on multiple roles, including that of a technology roadmap architect, resource allocator, key customer liaison, and company’s public image.
This is almost irreplaceable.
In 1993, Huang co-founded NVIDIA with two partners. At the early stage of the company, he made a bold bet on the technology direction, and he openly admitted the problem to a major customer, Sega, which secured the company’s funding and allowed it to restart. The RIVA 128, which was launched in 1997 and supported Direct3D, was an important result of this adjustment.
In 1999, NVIDIA went public on NASDAQ and launched the GeForce 256. It further integrated geometry transformation, lighting, and other tasks into the graphics chip, making the GPU a more complete graphics processor. The gaming business brought in market, revenue, and large-scale shipments, and continuously pushed the GPU to enhance its parallel computing capabilities. The hardware used by researchers to train neural networks was gradually developed in this commercial competition.
In 2007, NVIDIA released the CUDA toolkit and SDK 1.0, allowing developers to use more familiar programming methods to apply GPUs to computing beyond graphics, and benefiting tasks such as scientific simulation, image processing, and linear algebra. CUDA is considered an important moat for NVIDIA, gradually transforming the GPU’s hardware capabilities into a computing platform that programmers can use.
In 2012, the emergence of AlexNet provided a highly convincing validation of the integration of GPUs with deep learning. Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffrey Hinton achieved breakthrough results in AI image recognition. They used two GTX 580 GPUs, and the training process took about five to six days.
Since 2016, NVIDIA has further moved toward complete computing systems. In 2016, the integrated system DGX-1, specifically designed for deep learning, combined GPUs, AI software frameworks, and development tools. Huang personally delivered the first DGX-1 to OpenAI that year. In 2017, NVIDIA’s Volta architecture introduced Tensor Core, further optimizing for deep learning computing.
Over the past thirty years, he has led the company from a graphics chip manufacturer to one of the most important infrastructure providers in the global AI wave, and also made his name almost synonymous with NVIDIA. Nowadays,
this over three-decade-long journey as founder and CEOhas come to an end in a way that few could have predicted.
Jensen Huang once personally propelled NVIDIA to the center of the AI era.Now this company
must answer its future under a highly uncertain situation.
