Bloomberg Television8 min
Jensen Huang Resigns as Nvidia CEO
Jensen Huang, Colette Kress, Harvey Jones, Mandeep Singh, Alexis Christopherus
Interview
- Jensen Huang has stepped down as CEO of NVIDIA following a crisis, with CFO Colette Kress appointed as interim CEO.
- Kress, who joined NVIDIA 13 years prior after roles at Microsoft and Cisco, is expected to lead the company for one to two quarters while the board searches for a permanent replacement.
- NVIDIA's board is currently engaging an external firm to identify long-term CEO candidates.
- The market reacted to the news with NVIDIA shares declining over 11%, after initially dropping 8% on early rumors.
- Competitors AMD and Broadcom saw share price increases as investors sought alternative large-cap exposure to the AI sector.
- Internal candidate Ian Buck, the Stanford-born architect behind CUDA, is the primary front-runner for the permanent CEO role.
- Experts note the significant difficulty in replicating Jensen Huang's dual capability in technical engineering and deep ecosystem relationship management.
- NVIDIA maintains a product cadence of approximately six months, with the upcoming Rubin architecture projected to offer five times the throughput of the current Blackwell architecture.
- Investors are anxious about whether a new CEO can maintain the intra-company deals and circular relationships previously anchored by Huang.
- A technical leader like Buck may succeed in managing product iterations, though maintaining critical supply chain relationships with TSMC remains a specific challenge.
- The board includes new chair Harvey Jones, a founding director whose specific working relationship with Huang is not publicly detailed but assumed to be established.