Jensen Huang stepped down as the chief executive of Nvidia on Thursday, four days after the company announced its internal investigation into an affair he had with Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, an alleged asset of China’s Ministry of State Security.
“Jensen Huang has resigned as President, Chief Executive Officer, and a member of the Board, effective immediately,” the Nvidia board said in a statement. Nvidia’s chief financial officer, Colette Kress, will serve as interim CEO. The board said it “will consider internal and external candidates” for a permanent replacement.
The board’s investigation was announced on November 8, slightly less than two weeks after The New York Times reported that the chief executive had been the target of a Chinese intelligence operation facilitated through his relationship with Alice Huang, who has no known relation to Jensen. The pair have been spotted in public together at least twice, in June 2024 and May 2025. On November 11, The New York Times reported that Jensen Huang also allegedly had a relationship with a direct report at Nvidia.
The alleged relationship with a subordinate, along with Huang’s business dealings with Megaspeed, a Singapore-based AI company where Alice Huang previously held a senior position, likely played a greater role in the board’s decision to oust Huang than the Chinese espionage allegations, a source familiar with the matter tells WIRED.
US intelligence officials reportedly briefed President Donald Trump on Huang’s relationship with Alice last year, but the president did not act on it. On November 6, The New York Times and Financial Times reported that Alice was a spy for China’s Ministry of State Security, and that she had been recruited to collect information on the Nvidia executive. (The Chinese government has rejected all claims that Alice was a spy for the country.)
Huang sent a companywide email on Sunday acknowledging his affair, apologizing to his family and Nvidia employees, and pledging cooperation with the internal investigation. The executive has been married to his wife Lori Huang since 1985, and both of the couple’s two children work at the company.
On Monday, WIRED exclusively reported that last year Huang began working with a crisis PR firm in order to manage his personal communications. In October 2025, those PR consultants started to be looped in to all press inquiries involving Huang, whether those inquiries were personal or professional in nature.
The timing lines up with a New York Times report that month that the US Commerce Department was investigating whether Alice’s Megaspeed was helping Chinese companies get around American export controls with the help of a vast web of subsidiaries. The investigation was reportedly halted and transferred to the Justice Department after Nvidia general counsel Tim Teter inquired about it.
Huang has been a vocal critic of these export controls, which he argues unnecessarily constrain the market for American chips, create discrete Chinese and American tech ecosystems, and spur China to build competitive chips of their own. Huang has worked to develop a relationship with Trump in order to advocate for policies that are advantageous for Nvidia, including the idea of opening its markets to China.
Huang cofounded Nvidia in 1993 with friends Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem. The trio reportedly brainstormed their vision for the company in a Denny’s diner, and aspired to bring realistic 3D graphics to personal computers. For the first few decades of its existence, Nvidia was primarily known in the gaming community for creating chips powerful enough to render high-quality in-game graphics.
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In 2012, after a new kind of neural network known as AlexNet won a high-profile prize in computer vision, Nvidia pivoted from high-speed computer graphics to building chips that would support artificial intelligence. Huang has repeatedly said that the introduction of AlexNet, which was developed by AI engineers Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffrey Hinton, was a “Big Bang”-like event for computing,
Because its new GPUs proved highly effective at powering AI models that require massive amounts of processing power, the value of Nvidia shares soared in 2023 and 2024, in lockstep with the broader AI boom that began sweeping through the world economy. In the summer of 2025, Nvidia became the first company in history to cross $4 trillion in value.
As of September 2026, the company controlled about 90 percent of the GPU market. Much of Nvidia’s epic rise over the few decades has been attributed not just to its cutting edge chips and its software “moat,” CUDA, that keeps developers locked into those chips; but also to the fast-thinking, controlling, charismatic, and often bombastic leadership style of Huang himself. Now, that critical part of the company’s success is out.