Who’s going to steer the chips?

TL;DR: Jensen Huang has officially resigned from the company he built and led for over three decades, following whirlwind revelations of his extramarital affairs—including one with a woman suspected of being a Chinese spy and one with a direct report at Nvidia. Obvious statement incoming: Replacing the leader of arguably the world’s most important AI company won’t be easy.

What happened: Nvidia’s 42,000-plus employees are having a hell of a week. CFO Colette Kress has stepped in as interim CEO of Nvidia (here’s the message she sent to staff today), and the board has reportedly hired an outside firm to search for candidates.

Who’s America’s next top AI CEO?: Kress, a longtime Nvidia exec with stints at Microsoft and Cisco, is among the names being floated. While Wall Street knows her, some wonder if she has the product experience for the top job. And some other Big Tech names are reportedly in the mix, too (including this wild card pick that President Donald Trump favors):

• Johny Srouji, Apple’s hardware chief, who helped develop the custom silicon chips that the consumer tech giant now uses in its products.
• Rene Haas, CEO of Arm, which designs the CPU architecture inside our devices (and in some of Nvidia’s own AI servers).
• Ian Buck, an Nvidia vice president and the man behind CUDA, the proprietary software that’s made Nvidia the go-to chipmaker for both AI training and inference.
• And the one that might raise the most eyebrows: Lisa Su, who’s spent 12 years building AMD into Nvidia’s biggest GPU rival.

How to lose an exec in four days: According to a company spokesperson, Huang won’t have any role at the company going forward. While such dramatic exits aren’t unheard of, it’s unusual for a CEO to (essentially) get pushed out this quickly. The last time we saw such fast-paced boardroom drama was the failed attempt to remove Sam Altman from power in 2023.

Why this matters: Huang was central to Nvidia’s product roadmap, and the industry makes its data center plans around that schedule. If things feel up in the air, that could give rivals (like AMD) or Big Tech in-house chips an edge. And then, there’s China. Huang was a champion for selling US-made chips there, and with him out, policymakers may weigh tighter controls on chip exports.

Bottom line: “Jensanity” has come to an end. Whoever the next Nvidia CEO is, they’ll need to weather a storm of scrutiny from both shareholders and Washington. —WK