Jensen Huang officially resigned as Nvidia CEO on Thursday morning, a development the tech industry has described as seismic. Nvidia is one of the most valuable companies in the world, with a nearly $4 trillion valuation, and Huang was the company's original CEO and co-founder. The company's board said Huang has also resigned as president and as a member of the board, effective immediately.

Colette Kress, the company's CFO, will serve as interim CEO while also maintaining her CFO responsibilities, and the board has begun searching for a new CEO both inside and outside the company. Huang had long been seen as indispensable to Nvidia, which has no succession plan of its own and had only ever had one CEO, a position that made the affair reports especially consequential.S1S2

The downfall followed reports last Friday by the New York Times and Financial Times that Huang had an affair with a woman the U.S. intelligence community believed to be a Chinese spy, an allegation China disputed. The Times reported that Secretary of State Marco Rubio personally wrote a memo alerting President Donald Trump to the situation in the spring. On Nov. 8, Huang posted a personal apology on the Nvidia website, saying he had been unfaithful to his wife and that there was no excuse for his actions, and the board opened an investigation.S2

News of a second affair, reported by the New York Times on Wednesday with another Nvidia executive who reported to him, identified as Kimberly Powell, the company's vice president of healthcare, is widely seen as having sealed Huang's fate. Because Nvidia chips provide much of the compute powering the fast-growing AI industry, the matter was treated as a national security issue rather than a typical executive scandal.S1S2