Jensen Huang has resigned as Chief Executive Officer of artificial intelligence giant Nvidia, the company said on Thursday.
His exit follows revelations that he had two extramarital affairs, one of them with a woman accused of spying for China.
Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress will serve as interim CEO while the board searches for a permanent successor. This ends Huang’s 33-year run at the helm of the global company he co-founded.
Huang, 63, also gave up his seat on the board. The company did not give a reason for his departure.
The scandal has sent the shares of the multi-trillion-dollar company tumbling. Huang’s exit leaves Nvidia without its founding leader at a crucial time for the sector, as he has been a key promoter of the artificial intelligence boom.
Nvidia shares were down more than 10 per cent in premarket trading on Thursday after the announcement. The stock was already down about 25 per cent from its all-time high in early October.
Beijing has rejected the spying allegations.
The board said it had appointed Harvey Jones, a former chief executive of chip design software firm Synopsys, as its first-ever chair.
“The Board has full confidence in Colette and the leadership team, and we expect the company’s operations, customer commitments and product roadmap to continue without interruption,” Jones said in a statement.
Kress said she was committed to “building on the extraordinary foundation Jensen created over the last 33 years.”
The scandal began with reports that Huang, who has been married to Lori Huang for more than 40 years, was involved in an extramarital relationship.
Huang admitted on Sunday to having an affair, reportedly with Alice Huang, a former senior executive at Singapore-based data centre company Megaspeed. The two are not related.
US intelligence reportedly circulated a memo this spring alleging that Alice Huang was an asset of China’s Ministry of State Security.
On Sunday, Nvidia’s board announced a probe into what it called reporting that Huang had been the target of a “foreign intelligence effort.” It said at the time that it retained confidence in him.
On Wednesday, The New York Times reported that Huang had a second extramarital affair. The paper cited video evidence of him being affectionate with Nvidia’s Vice President of Health Care, Kimberly Powell.
Powell, 48, has been a public face of Nvidia’s efforts to extend its technology into higher education and health care. She was speaking at a conference in San Jose, California, where bystanders say the two “were seen being affectionate at the hotel,” the Times reported.
Nvidia’s code of conduct tells employees to avoid conflicts of interest and cites “personal relationships” as an example.
Nvidia shareholders have filed a class action lawsuit against Huang and the company for failing to disclose information about the relationship to investors.
Huang had repeatedly avoided naming a successor whenever the question was raised.
Kress joined Nvidia as finance chief in 2013, after nearly 25 years in finance roles at companies including Cisco and Microsoft.
Nvidia was founded in 1993. It designs graphics processing units (GPUs), components originally created to handle 3D visuals in video games that have become the backbone of AI systems.
Its processors are mostly made by Taiwanese company TSMC, the world’s largest contract manufacturer of chips.
Nvidia said it would release its quarterly results as scheduled on November 17.
