Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang, the preeminent face of the AI infrastructure boom, was ousted from his post after reports of three affairs, including one with a woman suspected of spying for China.

Longtime Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress is taking the job of interim CEO, Nvidia said on Thursday, and Huang will no longer have ties with the chipmaker. The board, which has never had a chair before, appointed director Harvey Jones to that role. Jones, 73, formerly led Synopsys Inc., a company that Nvidia took a $2 billion stake in last year.

The resignation deepens a crisis partly of Nvidia’s own making, since the company has long lacked a clear succession plan. The 63-year-old has been Nvidia’s only CEO during its three-decade history. He carefully managed every part of the business, while also serving as a cheerleader for the broader AI industry.

Huang transformed Nvidia from a niche maker of computer graphics components into the world’s biggest seller of AI computing chips, the highly prized products at the center of a global spending frenzy. Along the way, he became a key supporter of AI companies, investing in customers through equity stakes, credits for chips and other deals. He also lobbied the U.S. government for looser restrictions on chip exports to China.

“Jensen Huang’s resignation is a watershed moment for Nvidia, which now has to prove it can maintain its AI dominance without the leader largely responsible for building it,” Emarketer senior analyst Asa Hiken said in a note. “And given the broader AI industry’s heavy dependence on Nvidia’s chips, Huang’s departure introduces uncertainty well beyond the company itself.”

Nvidia shares initially plunged as much as 14% before paring their losses. The stock was down 4.3% to $166.19 at the market close on Thursday, erasing over $180 billion from the company’s valuation.

“Jensen’s contributions to Nvidia are profound,” the board said. “Nvidia is one of the most consequential technology companies in the world. The board and the company thank Jensen for his immeasurable contributions to the company and the industry.”

Huang, one of the three engineers who founded the chipmaker in 1993, had been under intense pressure since Sunday, when he admitted to a romantic relationship with Alice Huang, a former executive at the Singapore-based data center firm Megaspeed International. The crisis intensified Wednesday after the New York Times reported that Huang had had another affair — this one with an Nvidia employee. On Thursday, Reuters reported that Huang also had an intimate relationship with a second unnamed employee.

The former CEO has enlisted law firm Paul Weiss, according to a person familiar with the situation who asked not to be identified because the information isn’t public. The move was previously reported by the Times, which said litigators Melinda Haag and Walter Brown would handle his case.

The Justice Department, meanwhile, is probing whether entities linked to Alice Huang were involved in efforts to smuggle products made by Super Micro Computer Inc. to China, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The Nvidia turmoil rippled through the entire artificial intelligence sector on Thursday, dragging down shares of semiconductor companies such as Micron Technology Inc. and Marvell Technology Inc., the so-called neoclouds such as CoreWeave Inc. and Nebius Group NV, and even AI-adjacent companies, including power equipment firms Vertiv Holdings Co. and Bloom Energy Corp. On the other hand, shares of Nvidia rivals such as Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Broadcom Inc. gained.

“There will be a tremendous loss of credibility for Nvidia overall,” Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Mandeep Singh said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “Given their importance in the AI ecosystem and everything that they were doing from a deal perspective,” Singh said Huang’s exit may have a disproportionate impact on the neoclouds supplying AI computing and open-source and open-weight AI model developers.

Kress, who joined Nvidia 13 years ago after stints at Microsoft Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc., has spent her career in financial roles. While she has represented the company at Wall Street-related events, her public role has been confined to Nvidia’s numbers. The majority of communication with the financial community has been handled by her former boss.

Under Huang’s leadership, Nvidia’s shares soared more than 700,000% since it became a public company in 1999. The firm’s market valuation has at times topped $5 trillion, ranking it among the largest companies in the world. The staggering growth eclipses anything accomplished by Apple Inc.’s Steve Jobs, Microsoft Corp.’s Bill Gates or Amazon.com Inc.’s Jeff Bezos.

Huang’s departure threatens to reverberate far beyond Nvidia. He has used Nvidia’s financial strength to back dozens of major AI players including frontier labs OpenAI and Anthropic PBC. He’s also both invested in and backstopped financing deals for cloud computing firms including CoreWeave Inc., inspiring others to forge similar arrangements with one another to bolster the entire AI ecosystem. Big names on Wall Street including Michael Burry of The Big Short fame have warned that such circular deals are artificially inflating AI demand.

“As a student of economic history, I don’t know if there’s ever been such a key man holding so much of this industry up,” Blue Bear Capital investor Thomas Ferguson said of Huang while speaking at the BNEF Houston Summit on Wednesday ahead of his departure.

Huang has also led high-profile efforts to promote the worldwide expansion of data centers, traveling extensively to speak at conferences, lectures and other events. Wearing his signature leather jackets, he’s drawn crowds of fans swept up in “Jensanity.”

The executive has become close with U.S. President Donald Trump, appearing at White House meetings on technology, at state dinners and aboard Air Force One. Huang has enjoyed far greater access to the president than most corporate leaders. Trump on Monday backed Huang as “a very honorable man.”

The revelations about the Nvidia CEO’s affair with Alice Huang, an executive at Megaspeed, raised serious questions about his judgment. Huang also had a relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of healthcare.

Megaspeed, which was spun out of a Chinese gaming enterprise, is one of Nvidia’s largest Southeast Asian customers and has been under U.S. investigation for months related to the potential smuggling of Nvidia’s advanced AI chips into China, Bloomberg has reported. Megaspeed and Nvidia have denied wrongdoing.

Using a network of companies, Alice Huang also forged ties with DeepSeek, a top Chinese AI startup, the Information reported on Thursday. She invested in the business with the intention of supplying it with advanced Nvidia chips, the news outlet said.

Nvidia’s board has been working with an outside firm to identify potential replacements for Huang, a person familiar with the matter said Wednesday, asking not to be identified because the information isn’t public. Directors had met remotely on Wednesday to decide Huang’s fate, people familiar with the situation said.

Possible candidates include Lisa Su, CEO of rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc.; Rene Haas, chief at Arm Holdings Plc; and Micron leader Sanjay Mehrotra.

“We see considerable uncertainty around further news flow that is probably going to be coming down the pipe, as well as the ability of any new CEO to truly fill Jensen’s shoes given how tightly he managed the direction of the business and its relationships with customers, suppliers, employees and the broader industry ecosystem,” Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon said in a note.

U.S. lawmakers have called for Huang to appear before congressional committees and threatened a subpoena if he failed to appear. Nvidia’s board said on Tuesday that it had hired Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz partner Joon H. Kim, a former career federal prosecutor, “to conduct a thorough and independent investigation.”

For the AI supply chain, “we wonder what will happen to the company’s myriad of investments in the space, various backstops and residual guarantees,” Rasgon said.

While Rasgon acknowledged it had been tough to make a call on the stock, he downgraded Nvidia to “market perform” and lowered the price target to $200 — one of several downward revisions of Nvidia ratings by analysts. “Our gut tells us that we probably haven’t yet fully probed the depths of what might be found here,” Rasgon said in the note. “We’ve had enough, and prefer to watch from the sidelines.”

As Nvidia’s CEO, Huang was notorious for being a micromanager who had as many as 60 leaders reporting directly to him. Every employee had to write a list of their five most important tasks and publish them internally. Huang would sift through these to make sure that everyone understood what to focus on and personally write to even lower-level employees with advice or redirection.

But within Nvidia, employees had noticed that Huang had been less engaged in recent days, according to a person familiar with the situation. That included not immediately responding to his regular “top five” emails, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private. Nvidia’s leader is typically so focused on operations that he is known to personally review every employee’s compensation.

“My management style is what made it possible for the company to grow,” he told Bloomberg News’ Emily Chang in a recent interview. “I wanted an organization that was able to adapt to change, both in inventing change for itself and the rest of the industry, as well as reacting to change that’s coming toward us.”

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