Jensen Huang Resigns as Nvidia CEO

Nvidia's board said Thursday that Jensen Huang has resigned as president, chief executive officer and a member of the board, effective immediately. The announcement came four days after the company said it had opened an internal investigation, and it follows reporting about his ties to an alleged Chinese intelligence operative.

The board disclosed that investigation on November 8, slightly less than two weeks after The New York Times reported that Huang had been the target of a Chinese intelligence operation. On November 6, the Times and the Financial Times reported that Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le and with no known relation to Jensen Huang, was a spy for China's Ministry of State Security who had been recruited to gather information about the Nvidia executive. Beijing has rejected the claims. On November 11, the Times reported that Jensen Huang had also allegedly been in a relationship with a direct report at Nvidia.

A source familiar with the matter told WIRED that the alleged relationship with a subordinate, along with Huang's business dealings with Megaspeed, a Singapore-based AI company where Alice Huang previously held a senior position, likely weighed more heavily in the board's decision than the espionage allegations. Huang sent a companywide email on Sunday acknowledging the affair, apologizing to his family and Nvidia employees, and pledging cooperation with the internal investigation.

WIRED reported Monday that Huang had begun working with a crisis PR firm last year to manage his personal communications, and that in October 2025 those consultants were looped into every press inquiry involving him, personal or professional. The timing coincides with a New York Times report that month that the US Commerce Department was investigating whether Megaspeed was helping Chinese companies sidestep American export controls through a vast web of subsidiaries; that inquiry was reportedly halted and transferred to the Justice Department after Nvidia general counsel Tim Teter raised it.

Huang has been a vocal critic of export controls, arguing they unnecessarily constrain the market for American chips, create separate Chinese and American tech ecosystems, and push China to build competitive chips of its own. He has cultivated a relationship with President Donald Trump to advocate for policies advantageous to Nvidia, including opening China's market to its products. Nvidia's business itself was remade by the shift to AI: the company moved from gaming graphics to chips for machine learning after the AlexNet neural network won a computer-vision prize in 2012, a moment Huang has repeatedly called a "Big Bang" for computing.

What remains open includes whether the board's investigation yields further findings or personnel changes, who takes the chief executive role permanently, and whether the Justice Department resumes or expands the Megaspeed inquiry. Also in question is whether Nvidia continues to press Washington on export controls and China access under new leadership, and how the leadership transition affects its AI chip business.