The most valuable company in the world woke up on Thursday without the man who built it. Jensen Huang, who co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and ran it for 33 years, resigned as president, chief executive and a member of the board, effective immediately, the company announced on the morning of November 12. Chief financial officer Colette Kress will serve as interim CEO while the board searches for a permanent successor.
The market did not wait to react. Nvidia shares fell 13.4 percent to $150.49 shortly after the open, down from the November 11 close of $173.73, wiping roughly $560 billion off the company's market value at the low point of the session. The stock recovered part of the loss during the day and closed down 4.3 percent at $166.19, with its market value ending just above $4 trillion after trading below that line for much of the session.
What Nvidia announced
Nvidia's announcement, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, set out three changes at the top. Huang stepped down from all three of his roles at once: president, chief executive and director. Kress, who has been Nvidia's chief financial officer since September 2013, becomes interim CEO and keeps her finance role until a permanent chief is appointed. And the board named Harvey C. Jones, a former chief executive and executive chairman of chip-design software firm Synopsys, as its first-ever board chair.
The board accepted Huang's resignation on November 11, according to the company's filing, and announced it publicly the next morning. The board said it will consider internal and external candidates for the permanent job, and gave no timeline for the search.
A brutal day for the stock
The sell-off was swift and broad. Nvidia had been the world's largest company, worth about $5 trillion, but during Thursday's session it dropped to third place behind Apple and Microsoft as its value touched about $3.75 trillion at one point. Shares traded at roughly five times their normal volume, and the slide dragged other artificial-intelligence-linked stocks lower with it, as investors weighed what the sudden exit means for a company that supplies most of the world's advanced AI processors.
The scale of the move put it in historic company: the stock was on track for its biggest one-day drop since January 2025, and its market value fell below $4 trillion for the first time since July 2025. By the close, Nvidia's shares were trading at about 12 times estimated earnings for the next 12 months, their lowest valuation multiple since November 2012, according to LSEG data cited by Reuters.
Why now
Nvidia's announcement gave no reason for the departure. It came a day after The Wall Street Journal reported that the board was preparing to remove Huang, and after days of reports about his conduct. The board had opened an investigation after reports linked Huang to a Chinese businesswoman whom U.S. authorities suspect of intelligence activity, and The New York Times reported on a relationship with an executive at a Nvidia customer. Nvidia said it hired the law firm Wachtell Lipton to investigate the intelligence allegations. Neither the company's filing nor its press release gives a reason for the resignation or describes any severance arrangement.
Huang's exit ends one of the longest runs in American business. He co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and led it from a maker of graphics chips for video games into the company at the center of the artificial-intelligence boom, becoming the best-known figure in the industry along the way. For 33 years, the company had exactly one leader.
What happens next
The first hard test for the new leadership comes on Tuesday, November 17, when Nvidia reports results for the third quarter of fiscal 2027 at about 1:20 p.m. Pacific time, as previously scheduled, followed by an earnings call at 2 p.m. The company said the results will go ahead as planned, and Kress will face investors less than a week after taking the interim job.
The numbers behind the sell-off
At its worst, the stock fell about 16 percent to near $148.80, and about 737 million shares changed hands during the session — roughly five times Nvidia's three-month average volume. The shares had opened about 12 percent lower and were still down more than 6 percent by 10 a.m. Eastern, with about $830 billion in value erased at that point in the morning, according to NBC News. It was the kind of trading day that usually follows an earnings disaster, not a press release — except this press release was the disaster.
Whoever takes over inherits more than a chip business. Nvidia sits at the center of Washington's fight over artificial-intelligence chip exports: Axios reported that President Donald Trump has approved a crackdown on firms suspected of diverting Nvidia AI chips to China three times this year, in May, in August, and again on November 5 — though the restrictions still have not been implemented. The next chief executive will run the world's most valuable chip company while regulators, lawmakers and the White House all argue over who its chips may be sold to.
Until a permanent chief is named, the questions pile up faster than the answers: who runs the world's most important chip company, how the board's search unfolds, and whether the sell-off was a one-day shock or the start of a longer reassessment. What is certain is that the 33-year era of Jensen Huang at Nvidia ended in a single morning — and the market noticed within minutes.
