Nvidia leadership shake-up puts possible successors in focus

A report published Thursday claims Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang has resigned after allegations surfaced about an affair with a woman identified as Alice Huang, who the report describes as a suspected Chinese spy. The claims have not been independently verified here.

The article says Huang’s career began at Denny’s, where he worked as a dishwasher, busboy and waiter in 1978. He later co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and led the company for 31 years as it grew into a major force in gaming and artificial intelligence.

According to the report, Nvidia named Executive Vice President and CFO Colette Kress interim CEO. Harvey C. Jones is set to become the company’s first appointed board chair. Nvidia’s board praised Huang’s contributions to the company and the technology industry.

Speculation about a permanent successor had begun before the reported resignation. Prediction-market traders were said to favor Ian Buck, Nvidia’s vice president and general manager for Hyperscale and HPC. Buck joined the company in 2004 and helped develop CUDA, Nvidia’s platform for programming its GPUs. He has a doctorate in computer science from Stanford University.

Kress was reportedly in second place among traders’ choices. She has worked in technology for about 25 years, including at Microsoft and Cisco, and holds a finance degree from the University of Arizona and an MBA from Southern Methodist University. Jensen Huang’s daughter, Madison Huang, was also mentioned, but the report put her at about a 3% chance of getting the job.

Other names raised online included former Apple CEO Tim Cook, Apple hardware chief Johny Srouji, AMD CEO Lisa Su and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan.

The report says Nvidia did not respond to questions about the timing of a permanent appointment, possible U.S. government investigations into Alice Huang’s alleged China ties, or whether the company’s gaming and AI plans might change. It also says Nvidia shares fell after news of the alleged affair, then began to recover after the interim leadership announcement.

It remains unclear what effect, if any, the reported events will have on Nvidia’s business or the broader AI industry.