Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is stepping down, leaving the AI industry without its biggest champion and clouding the future of the chipmaker he built into an AI powerhouse.

Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress will take over as interim CEO as Nvidia looks for a permanent successor, the company said on Thursday.

It named former Synopsys CEO and board member Harvey Jones as its first-ever board chairman.

Huang, who co-founded Nvidia and is its fourth-largest investor with a stake of about 3.61 percent, will exit the board as well.

Nvidia shares fell more than 10 percent in premarket trading, and weighed on the broader market.

Pressure had been mounting on Huang in recent days after reports said the 63-year-old, who is married, had an affair with a Chinese businesswoman who US authorities suspect of spying for Beijing.

China has dismissed the spying allegations, calling them "baseless".

Nvidia's board met on Wednesday to consider his ouster, a person familiar with the matter said, after reports earlier in the day that Huang also had an extramarital affair with a senior company executive who reported to him.

Huang's exit plunges the US$4 trillion company into uncertainty and threatens to disrupt an AI ecosystem that he helped bankroll by pouring Nvidia's swelling cash pile back into cloud providers, suppliers and the industry's biggest labs.

"The risk is not that Nvidia suddenly loses its technology roadmap... that roadmap is largely visible for the next several years. The risk is execution. Jensen has been the chief conductor of an extraordinarily complex system," said Michael Feldman, portfolio manager at ClearBridge Investments.

"In a world with real bottlenecks, that coordination is a competitive advantage in itself."

Investor sentiment toward AI stocks has already been shaky as soaring cash burn and rising debt at traditionally cash-rich tech giants fuel doubts over whether the AI boom will pay off. (Reuters)



Edited by Edmond Fong