NVIDIA (NVDA) Slips 7.4% After Jensen Huang's Resignation as CEO

Huang Resigns, Kress Named Interim CEO

NVIDIA co-founder Jensen Huang resigned as president, chief executive and board director with immediate effect, and the company's shares sold off hard at Thursday's open. In its official announcement, the board appointed finance chief Colette Kress as interim chief executive while she keeps her roles as executive vice president and CFO until a permanent successor is appointed, and named Harvey C. Jones as chairman. A formal search for the next CEO is under way, with internal and external candidates both in scope, and Jones said the board expects operations, customer commitments and the product roadmap to continue without interruption.

The initial market reaction was severe. Shares opened at $150.99, down 13.09% from Wednesday's $173.73 close, and touched a low of $148.80 before clawing back part of the loss; at 14:39 UTC the stock quoted $159.57, down 8.15%, on unusually heavy trading volume. The pressure spread unevenly across the chip complex rather than hitting every name at once. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index lost 1.29% to 10,427.51, the VanEck Semiconductor ETF (SMH) fell 1.80% to $497.85, and the Nasdaq Composite slipped 0.58% to 25,319.59, so NVIDIA's slide ran far ahead of the broader tape. TSMC's American depositary receipts shed 1.51% to $407.01 and Micron gave up 2.58% to $790.41. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) moved the other way, rising 3.17% to $570.43, and Broadcom gained 5.01% to $362.51, a split that framed the session as rotation inside chips rather than a sector-wide exit.

The company kept its reporting calendar intact: fiscal 2027 third-quarter results remain due on 18 November, with the conference call the same day, and Kress will front it, adding the transition duties to the operational brief she already holds and carrying on the set product and customer commitments.

Kress's Record and the SEC Mining Case

Kress has run NVIDIA's finances for 13 years, and her record before the promotion is long on both achievement and legal exposure. She was finance chief of Microsoft's server and tools division from 2006 to 2010, a period in which division revenue rose from $11.2 billion in fiscal 2007 to $14.9 billion in fiscal 2010 and Microsoft launched Azure, though that growth cannot be attributed to her alone.

Her best-known brush with regulators stems from the 2017 crypto boom, when miners bought gaming GPUs in large numbers. In 2022, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) fined NVIDIA $5.5 million for failing to disclose the role of mining in its revenue growth, a penalty the agency set out in its 2022 announcement. Shareholders separately accused Kress of misleading investors about that demand. An appeals court found in 2023 that there were sufficient grounds to consider her statements misleading, but upheld the dismissal of the claims against her because the alleged culpable state of mind was not plausibly pleaded. The case against NVIDIA and Huang continued, and investors won class certification in March 2026 over an alleged concealment of more than $1 billion in mining-related GPU revenue, covering buyers between 10 August 2017 and 15 November 2018, as a securities filing in the docket records.

Court records from Delaware show she sold 36,333 NVIDIA shares for $7.7 million between October 2017 and September 2018 under a trading plan, and the shareholder suit cited $147 million in alleged insider sales over the disclosure period. None of this establishes illegal trading. The advocacy group 1792 Exchange attributes $1,600 in Republican political contributions to Kress, a figure that remains unverified, and a July 2026 shareholder suit listed her among executives accused of allowing copyrighted books, video and audio in AI training, which is still an allegation with no finding of personal fault.

COINOTAG data shows the stock last quoted $160.44, down 7.41% on the day, within a 24-hour range of $149.22 to $177.82. The daily RSI sits at 22.1 with a bearish MACD reading and the trend flag on downtrend. COINOTAG's composite scoring rates the strongest support at $151.91, scored 77 out of 100, and the strongest resistance at $172.74, on the same score. A move back toward $172.74 would close much of the gap to the pre-resignation close, while losing $151.91 would leave the stock without its strongest scored floor.