NVIDIA CEO Jenssen Huang Resigns Amidst Affair Scandals

NVIDIA CEO Jenssen Huang submitted his resignation on Thursday, November 12, following revelations of another affair, this time with Kimberly Powell, a Vice President reporting directly to him and responsible for the company's healthcare division. Colette Kress, the company's CFO, has been appointed interim CEO. In the wake of Huang's resignation announcement, NVIDIA's stock price dropped by 10%. The company's ten-member board of directors held an extensive meeting on Wednesday evening, approving Kress's temporary leadership role until a permanent successor is chosen. On Thursday, the board stated it would commence a search for a new permanent CEO, considering both internal and external candidates. Among potential internal candidates, CFO Colette Kress, well-known to investors, and Ian Buck, Vice President overseeing data center products and creator of the CUDA platform, have been mentioned. However, CFOs are typically seen as interim solutions, and Buck lacks experience managing a large public company. The board is also exploring external candidates. Bloomberg has cited Jony Srouji, Apple's Senior Vice President of Hardware, who leads the development of the company's proprietary chips for iPhones, Macs, and other devices, as a possible contender. Srouji's expertise in chip design and technology strategy is highly valued, though his experience is within Apple's closed ecosystem, and he has not demonstrated the sales acumen for which Huang is known. Other external candidates mentioned by Bloomberg include ARM CEO Rene Haas, who previously worked at Nvidia, AMD CEO Lisa Su, Amazon AWS cloud division head Matt Garman, Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra, and Google's head of AI infrastructure Amin Vahdat. Huang's children, Spencer and Madison, and his son-in-law, who holds a VP position in global AI infrastructure, also work at Nvidia. Jenssen Huang himself had previously expressed a desire for his children not to bear the burden of leading the company.