Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Resigns Effective Immediately After Weeklong Scandal
The company's board announced Thursday that its co-founder is out, days after it opened a probe into his ties to a woman accused of helping divert restricted AI chips to China.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has resigned effective immediately, the company's board of directors announced Thursday, ending a 33-year run at the chipmaker he co-founded in 1993 and capping a scandal that has erased more than $450 billion of the company's market value in a matter of days.
The announcement came less than a day after The Wall Street Journal reported that board members were preparing to remove him. CBS News reported that the Trump administration was aware of the board's plans. Nvidia shares fell more than 8%, to $159.51, in after-hours trading on Wednesday, extending a slide that began on Nov. 8, when the company announced an investigation into Huang's conduct.
That probe centers on Huang's relationship with Alice Huang, a former television reporter and financial industry executive who is not related to him. In a message to employees on Sunday, Huang admitted to an affair and apologized to his wife and their two children, both of whom work at Nvidia. "There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry," he wrote. Corporate governance experts told CBS News the relationship appears to violate Nvidia's code of conduct, which warns that personal relationships can create conflicts of interest.
The business side of the story is what makes it a national security matter. U.S. investigators say Alice Huang used industry contacts and a series of shell companies to help a Singapore-based firm called Megaspeed obtain 240,000 AI chips that are banned from export to China. Megaspeed is now being investigated in both the United States and Singapore for allegedly smuggling the chips. President Trump said this week that the FBI is also looking into the romantic and business ties between the two Huangs. In a statement Thursday, Megaspeed said it takes its compliance obligations under U.S. export control laws "extremely seriously" and is committed to working with the U.S. government.
A short seller foreshadowed much of this. In May, Christian Lamarco of Culper Research published a 40-page report alleging that Nvidia had a "significant China problem" and that over 20% of its fiscal 2026 compute revenue was being driven by illegal chip diversion through Southeast Asian intermediaries. Culper disclosed that it had bet against Nvidia's stock. In March, Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Jim Banks had separately written to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick warning of large-scale diversion of American AI chips to China. Nvidia's board said Sunday it had no reason to believe company secrets or national security were compromised, and that it prioritizes U.S. national and economic security.
Huang is widely seen as the face of the artificial intelligence boom, since Nvidia's chips supply the computing power behind the leading AI models. Wall Street analysts said the company has no obvious successor. "Jensen is not replaceable by another CEO or group of interim executives," Dan Ives of Yorkville Ives said in a report earlier this week. Adam Crisafulli of Vital Knowledge called Huang "arguably the most prominent executive at the most prominent company sitting at the center of the world's most important industry."
CBS News described the story as breaking and said it would be updated, and details on who will run the company were still emerging. The fallout is also heading to Capitol Hill, where lawmakers are expected to question Nvidia executives about whether the company's chips are being funneled to China through other countries.
