Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia's chief executive on 11 November 2026, effective immediately. The board named Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress interim CEO. Nvidia's filing gives no reason for the resignation.
What did we learn from the filings and reports? The resignation followed a run of reports about Huang's relationship with a former executive of Megaspeed, a Singapore-based data centre company. Three limits apply to everything below.
The 8-K filing ties the resignation to nothing.
No public evidence shows Huang knew of any alleged intelligence role.
China's foreign ministry calls the claim "smears against China", and the US Attorney General said on 12 November that the Justice Department has not concluded whether the woman worked for Beijing.
Allegations in this article are labelled as reported, with the outlet named.
What happened?
Nvidia's Form 8-K, filed on 12 November, says the board accepted Huang's resignation as president, chief executive and director on 11 November. Kress is interim CEO while keeping her finance role, and director Harvey C. Jones becomes the company's first chair.
The backdrop is a run of reports that began on 29 October. The New York Times reported that US officials believed a former executive of Megaspeed passed information to Beijing, and that she had a close relationship with Huang. On 8 November, Huang admitted in a staff email that he had been unfaithful to his wife. His board opened an independent investigation, saying it had no reason to believe national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised.
Who is Jensen Huang, and how did Nvidia start?
Huang was born in Taipei in 1963 and, at nine, was sent to the United States with his older brother. Biographies, including Wikipedia's summary of the 2023 New Yorker and Stephen Witt reporting, describe a stay at Oneida Baptist Institute in Kentucky, a reform academy where he cleaned toilets. He later worked at Denny's, studied electrical engineering at Oregon State, and took a master's degree at Stanford through night classes. He married Lori Mills, a lab partner from Oregon State, in 1985. Both of their children work at Nvidia.
He co-founded Nvidia on 5 April 1993 with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, after meetings at a Denny's in East San Jose. Wikipedia's Nvidia entry records $20 million of venture capital from Sequoia, Sutter Hill and others. Huang was chief executive from day one, at 30.
The first product, the NV1, failed because its design did not fit Microsoft's Direct3D standard. Sega chose another vendor for the Dreamcast, but Sega's president persuaded his board to invest $5 million anyway. Huang cut staff from about 100 to 40 and bet the company on the RIVA 128, which shipped in August 1997 and sold about a million units in four months.
Nvidia listed on 22 January 1999 at $12 a share. The GeForce 256 followed in October 1999, the first product marketed as a graphics processing unit, or GPU. The company then won the Xbox graphics contract, and in 2002 fought Microsoft over its pricing in binding arbitration. The fiscal 2003 annual report shows the dispute settling on 6 February 2003.
What was Nvidia like before AI?
For most of its first three decades, Nvidia was a graphics company that sold cyclical products. In 2008 it wrote down about $200 million of revenue for abnormal failure rates in some chips. In 2018, crypto miners bought its cards, and the SEC later said Nvidia had failed to disclose how much that drove gaming revenue. Nvidia paid $5.5 million in 2022 without admitting or denying the finding. A related securities class action, covering 2017 and 2018, still appears in its latest quarterly report.
The company also made large acquisition attempts. It agreed to buy Mellanox for $6.9 billion in 2019, but abandoned a $40 billion deal for the chip designer Arm in February 2022 after regulators objected. Annual revenue was $26.9 billion in fiscal 2022 and $27.0 billion in fiscal 2023, per the fiscal 2024 annual report.
The long bet was software. In 2006 Nvidia launched CUDA, a platform that let developers run general-purpose programs on its GPUs. In 2012, the AlexNet image-recognition network, trained on two Nvidia gaming cards, showed that GPUs could train neural networks far faster than conventional processors. In 2016 Nvidia gave OpenAI the first DGX-1, a server built for the purpose.
How did ChatGPT change Nvidia, and what did it finance?
ChatGPT's launch in late 2022 turned that bet into a buying frenzy. Revenue reached $60.9 billion in fiscal 2024, $130.5 billion in fiscal 2025 and $215.9 billion in fiscal 2026, per the company's annual reports. On 29 October 2025 Nvidia became the first company to close above $5 trillion in market value, Yahoo Finance reported. The quarter to 26 July 2026 brought revenue of $96.2 billion.
Nvidia also became a financier of its own customers. The quarterly report for that period sets out the scale:
Commitments: $366 billion in total. Supply commitments rose from $119 billion to $279 billion in one quarter, mostly memory. A further $25 billion is committed to equity investments in AI model makers, infrastructure financiers and other private companies.
Investments: non-marketable equity stood at $47.9 billion, up from $22.3 billion at the start of the fiscal year.
Guarantees: $3.5 billion for lease obligations of select cloud partners. A separate guarantee for SB Energy, which is building a data centre campus in Ohio for an affiliate of OpenAI, is capped at $105 billion. An 8-K filed on 17 August says Nvidia pays any shortfall on residual values, and that OpenAI agreed to reimburse and indemnify Nvidia for amounts paid.
Customer credit: receivables stretched to 60 days of sales from 45, on extended payment terms for large multi-quarter agreements with investment-grade customers.
In August Nvidia also signed memoranda of understanding with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR on financing platforms meant to mobilise over $500 billion of outside capital, subject to definitive agreements.
The Wall Street Journal reported in July that Nvidia was in talks to guarantee about $250 billion of financing for the Ohio project, and later that the figure had fallen to under $120 billion. The Information reported in October that Huang's son-in-law, Nico Caprez, ran much of the push to finance cloud providers. Caprez declined an interview. Nothing published ties him to the OpenAI guarantee.
What is Michael Burry's criticism of Nvidia?
Michael Burry, the investor who bet against US housing before 2008, has published a series on Nvidia in his Cassandra Unchained newsletter. These are his claims and opinions. This article does not endorse them, and he gives no source for several figures.
Circular financing. He says Nvidia bought $42.4 billion of equity securities in the first half of 2026, which he puts at roughly 30 cents of every revenue dollar recycled into the AI build-out. He also says the third-party financing platforms push leverage in the system "upwards of 76x".
Depreciation. On 1 October he challenged an Nvidia investor slide on how well GPUs hold their value, arguing it compared eight-year models with a five-year accounting curve. He argues that a memory shortage, not durability, explains recent rental rises.
Pressure on customers. He says analysts allege Nvidia forward-sells to customers who cannot run the chips, leaving them undepreciated in warehouses. He calls the sales terms a "protection racket".
Megaspeed. He asks whether its chip purchases before export controls tightened were timed "too good", and says Megaspeed employed Huang's mistress. He presents this as suspicion, not proof.
On 13 November Burry pasted extracts from a Wall Street Journal story, headlined "Before His Ouster, Jensen Huang Belittled the Executive Replacing Him". As he relays it, Huang told finance executives in a summer meeting that Nvidia was in talks to provide billions of dollars of guarantees to companies unable to afford its chips, that cloud providers were "running away", and that committed wafer and memory supply was coming at him like an "avalanche". The same extract quotes a person familiar describing Kress as "a deer in the headlights". We have not reviewed the original story.
Burry says he currently holds no Nvidia shares or puts, though he holds puts on a semiconductor exchange-traded fund and on the Nasdaq 100. He expects Nvidia's coming quarter to "be great" and says the unwinding of its financing web will take time.
What happened in the 48 hours before the resignation?
The Megaspeed reporting. Megaspeed is a Singapore-based company that the US and Singapore confirmed they were investigating in October 2025. The New York Times reported that US surveillance of the former executive, Alice Huang, captured communications involving Huang, that officials believed the relationship romantic, and that a classified memo said China's Ministry of State Security had recruited her to target him. Alice Huang is not related to Jensen Huang. On 30 October Huang told Bloomberg that his interactions were "all completely normal and not unusual". He later told President Trump he "had no idea that she was a spy", per Newsweek. Singapore's home affairs ministry said it barred her from re-entry in February, and found insufficient evidence to prosecute her for false declarations. It did not investigate her for espionage, AFP reported. Three House committee chairs asked Huang on 5 November for a closed-door briefing.
Monday 9 November. Nvidia shares closed at $178.67, down 4.3%, per heygotrade. A shareholder class action followed, alleging that Nvidia's statements about Megaspeed were misleading. Trump called Huang "an honorable guy" and said he should stay.
Tuesday 10 November. The board retained Joon H. Kim, a former acting US Attorney in Manhattan, and the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, The Next Web reported. The stock traded near $168 at its low, about 30% below its October record.
Wednesday 11 November. The New York Times reported, citing five people who worked at Nvidia, a second relationship, with a senior Nvidia executive who reports to Huang. Neither Nvidia nor Huang confirmed it, and this article does not name her. The Wall Street Journal reported that the board was preparing to oust him. That night the board accepted his resignation.
Thursday 12 November. Nvidia disclosed the resignation before the US open. Shares fell as much as 13% at the open and touched $148.80, a 52-week low, before closing at $166.19, down 4.3%. Volume ran at roughly four to five times normal.
The filing is silent on why he left. Reports link the departure to the second-relationship story and the board's inquiry, but none of those links is confirmed.
Who succeeds Huang, and how did the media cover it?
Succession. Kress, 59, has been chief financial officer since 2013. The board says it is searching internal and external candidates for a permanent chief executive, and expects operations, customer commitments and the product roadmap to continue without interruption. Jones, 73, has been a director since 1993. Before the resignation, Fortune reported that Huang had about 60 direct reports, no operating chief and no public successor. He holds about 3.6% of the shares, without special voting rights. Trump suggested Apple's Tim Cook, whom Dan Ives called a dark horse. Neither Nvidia nor Apple has said anything on the idea.
Coverage. Outlets agree on the core facts: the 8-K, the apology, and the board inquiry. They disagree on details, including the size of Megaspeed's chip purchases ($4.8 billion in one account, $7.5 billion in another), Alice Huang's formal title, and whether the intelligence findings are settled. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal described officials as having determined she gathered information for Beijing. CNN reported that intelligence does not establish it, and the Attorney General said the question is open. Analysts moved quickly. Dan Ives cut his price target from $300 to $225, Oppenheimer downgraded the stock, and Bernstein moved to a neutral Market Perform rating.
What happens now?
The inquiry. The board's independent committee has not reported. Congress wants Huang to testify, with reported dates ranging from late November to December.
The search. A permanent chief executive may take months. The board has no member with national security experience, per The Next Web.
The balance sheet. The $366 billion of commitments and the $105 billion SB Energy guarantee remain in place, now overseen by an interim chief executive.
The litigation. A securities class action covering 9 October 2025 to 8 November 2026 is pending in the Northern District of California.
What should we watch in Nvidia's earnings on 17 November?
Nvidia reports third-quarter fiscal 2027 results, for the quarter to 25 October, on Tuesday 17 November, about 1:20 p.m. Pacific time, with a call at 2 p.m. It will be Kress's first call as interim chief executive.
Measure | Company guidance (26 August) | Consensus estimate |
|---|---|---|
Revenue | $108.0 billion, plus or minus 2% | about $109.2 billion |
GAAP gross margin | 74.0%, plus or minus 50 basis points | not sourced |
Earnings per share | not guided | about $2.48 |
Guidance excludes any China data centre compute revenue. Nvidia beat its second-quarter guide of $91.0 billion by about 5.7%, reporting $96.2 billion. Analysts will look at gross margin, the supply of Blackwell and Vera Rubin chips, the 2028 outlook, and whether Kress addresses the guarantees and customer financing directly. The quarter ended before the resignation.
Sources
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