By the Smili Phone team
For 33 years, Nvidia had exactly one leader. That ended on November 12, 2026, when the company announced that co-founder Jensen Huang had resigned as president, chief executive, and a member of the board, effective immediately. It is one of the biggest leadership changes in tech this year.
Huang built Nvidia from a small graphics chip startup into the company at the center of the AI boom. Its chips power the data centers that train large AI models and the graphics cards in gaming PCs. Few founders have stayed at the top of a company this large for this long, and fewer still have left this suddenly.
Who is running Nvidia now
Colette Kress, Nvidia's chief financial officer since September 2013, is now interim CEO. She keeps her finance job while she runs the company, and the board has started a search for a permanent chief executive, inside and outside the company, with no deadline announced.
The board also named Harvey C. Jones as its first ever chair. Jones previously served as chief executive and executive chairman of Synopsys. Nvidia had never had a separate board chair before, so this is a new structure for the company as well as a new leader.
What Nvidia did and did not say
The company gave no reason for Huang's resignation in its announcement, and the announcement included no quote from him. The board accepted his resignation on November 11, and the news was made public the next day in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Press reports in the days before linked the departure to scrutiny of Huang's personal conduct. On November 8, Huang had apologized to Nvidia employees for being unfaithful to his wife. Reports also raised questions about a possible foreign intelligence effort targeting him, and the board said it hired the law firm Wachtell Lipton to investigate. None of that appears in Nvidia's own announcement.
What happens next
The first big test comes fast. Nvidia reports its third quarter fiscal 2027 results on Tuesday, November 17, at about 1:20 PM Pacific, with an earnings call at 2 PM. That call will be Kress's first as interim CEO, and investors will be listening for any sign of a change in direction. The company has said the schedule is unchanged and gave no new financial guidance in the transition announcement.
For most people, the practical effects will take time to show. Nvidia's products do not change because the chief executive changed, and its roadmap for new chips was set long before this week. What changes is who makes the next big calls: which products get the most investment, how the company handles its biggest cloud customers, and how it answers rising competition from AMD and others.
Leadership transitions at companies this size are rarely smooth, and this one is unusual even by that standard: a founder who ran a company for 33 years leaves with no successor named, five days before earnings. The board's choice of Kress, who has run Nvidia's finances for more than a decade, signals that the priority right now is steadiness.
Watch the November 17 earnings call and the permanent CEO search in the weeks after. The first will tell you how the business is doing, and the second will tell you where Nvidia thinks it is going. If your phone needs attention in the meantime, bring it by our shop in Escondido and we will take a look together.
Related: Google's AI Video Maker Now Makes 15 Seconds · Claude's New Models Built an Operating System
