Jensen Huang has resigned from his position as president and chief executive of Nvidia, the company said on Thursday, just a few days after he admitted to a romantic affair with an alleged Chinese spy, sparking a U.S. national security crisis.
In a regulatory filing, Nvidia said its board accepted Huang’s resignation on Wednesday.
Nvidia said its current chief financial officer and executive vice president, Collete Kress, will take over as interim CEO until the company finds a permanent successor. Kress will continue to serve as the company’s CFO.
Nvidia’s shares were down nearly 12% in early morning trading on Thursday. Since Friday, the company’s stock has fallen by as much as 19%, resulting in a market cap loss of more than $855 billion.
Huang founded Nvidia in 1993 and has led it as CEO ever since. Under his leadership, Nvidia played a crucial role in developing the the graphics processing unit (GPU), a specialized chip that does graphics processing for PCs, as we know it today. The chips were not an immediate hit, and the early days of Nvidia were characterized by struggle and layoffs, but eventually, it struck on a GPU design that performed so well, it became the standard for graphics processing.
These chips also turned out to be extremely good at doing large numbers of calculations simultaneously, which has made them popular for computation-intensive tasks like crypto mining, and more recently, training and running neural networks, which are what AI models are at their core.
Nvidia was initially focused on making GPUs aimed at gaming, but it had already moved into general-purpose computing by 2006 with the launch of the CUDA architecture, which lets developers use the chips for other tasks, such as doing calculations and research. After AI researchers began using the company’s GPUs to train neural networks over a decade ago, Huang leaned in towards developing chips for AI and then data centers, and grew it from there into its dominant position.
Repercussions galore
The potential implications of Huang’s departure for the AI and data center industries are vast, given how active Huang, and by extension Nvidia, has been in furthering the AI boom. In particular, it raises questions about the future of Nvidia’s sprawling AI investments, which have helped bankroll everything from startups developing new technologies to the enormous data centers needed to run them.
Under Huang, Nvidia deftly used its financial muscle to support companies buying its chips, effectively helping to finance the market for its own products, as well as lobbying Washington to relax potential rules around AI and data center regulation.
As of the end of its second quarter, Nvidia reported $99 billion worth of investments and another $25 billion of commitments. It also has $36 billion in cloud service commitments, which are arrangements that help AI cloud operators finance the GPUs and data center equipment they buy from Nvidia, with the chipmaker saying it will buy compute from them and potentially earn a share of their operators’ revenue.
