The departure follows days of disclosures about Huang's personal life. He publicly admitted to an extramarital affair with a woman named Alice Huang shortly before resigning. Accounts of who she is differ: she has been described as a Singapore-based businesswoman and as an executive at Megaspeed, a Nvidia customer. US officials reportedly suspected she had been recruited by China's Ministry of State Security. Beijing denied the allegations. Nvidia said it had no reason to believe national security was compromised.

The board opened an independent investigation on Sunday, according to accounts of the proceedings, and it examined reports that Huang may have been the target of a foreign intelligence effort. Several accounts link the resignation to the affair and the intelligence questions, though the company itself has drawn no such connection.

Nvidia's stock fell after the investigation was announced and the espionage reports surfaced, by somewhere between 7% and 8% depending on the measurement. The company's market value dropped from $5.78 trillion in October to $4.51 trillion by November 6.

The board praised Huang's "profound" and "immeasurable contributions to the company and the industry," and said it had "full confidence" in Kress, crediting her role in the company's "extraordinary growth." Kress said Nvidia would keep its focus on accelerated computing and AI, building on the foundation Huang created. The company said operations and the product roadmap would continue without interruption. The board also appointed Harvey C. Jones as its first-ever chair.

Kress has been executive vice president and CFO since joining Nvidia in September 2013, and she keeps those roles during the transition. Annual revenue was just over $4 billion in fiscal 2013. It passed $215 billion in fiscal 2026, a 65% increase over the prior year.

Huang, who was born in Taipei in 1963, studied electrical engineering at Oregon State University and completed a master's degree at Stanford in 1992, after working at LSI Logic and Advanced Micro Devices. He founded Nvidia with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem. By 1997 the company was close to bankruptcy, with one month of payroll left. It developed the GPU in 1999 and the CUDA software platform in 2006, and under Huang it grew from a maker of gaming graphics chips into the builder of the computing infrastructure behind the AI boom. It reached a $5 trillion market capitalization in October 2025 and has signed a letter of intent to invest $100 billion in OpenAI.

Nvidia had no named successor to Huang before Kress's interim appointment.