Jensen Huang leaves Nvidia; interim CEO reassures staff as industry weighs impact

In the early hours of November 13, 2026, CNBC reported that Nvidia interim CEO Colette Kress and board chair Harvey Jones had emailed the company's employees, expressing gratitude for their resilience, professionalism and continued dedication. The message did not disclose any further business plans, reflecting the posture of a company still being run by an interim CEO in the period following Jensen Huang's departure.

Responses and assessments from across the industry followed quickly. TechCrunch reported that the CEO of Hugging Face publicly pledged to keep fighting for open-source AI after Huang's exit, a stance that also drew outside attention to the fate of a $12.9B acquisition by Nvidia. Forbes reported that Nvidia's leadership uncertainty could reshape the AI industry, create opportunities for competitors, and influence the broader stock market, framing Huang's departure as a major variable for the company at the center of AI chip supply. The Guardian noted that Huang's exit, linked to an affair and his resignation, has brought the company's corporate contracts and supply chains into focus. As the world's second-most valuable company, Nvidia builds its business on designing and selling GPUs, and the analysis questioned how severely the AI economy built on those chips would be affected. Across these reports, the assessments remain at the level of analysis and discussion, with Nvidia's forward-looking business arrangements still undisclosed.