Nvidia’s board is preparing to oust chief executive Jensen Huang, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter.
Nvidia has not confirmed the report.
CBS News reported the same, citing two sources, and said the Trump administration was aware of the matter.
According to the Journal, the board could meet as soon as Wednesday to decide his future.
As of 12:10am GMT on Thursday, Nvidia had made no announcement. Its newsroom carried no new board statement, and its latest SEC filing was dated November 6, according to EDGAR.
That leaves the board’s own November 8 statement as its latest word on Huang’s leadership. It said the board “has confidence in Jensen and his leadership team”.
The reports follow Huang’s November 8 admission to staff that he had been unfaithful to his wife. On Wednesday, The New York Times alleged a separate relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of healthcare. Nvidia, Huang and Powell have not confirmed that report.
Nvidia shares closed Wednesday’s regular session up 2.87% at $173.73, then fell to $161.64 in after-hours trading at 7:07pm ET (12:07am GMT Thursday), a drop of 7%, according to Yahoo Finance data.
What the board has actually said
The board’s public statements so far concern an investigation, not Huang’s job. On November 8 it said a committee of independent directors, assisted by outside counsel, would examine reports that Huang had been “the target of a foreign intelligence effort”.
It added that it had “no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised”. On November 10, the independent directors said they had retained Joon H. Kim, a former acting US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and his firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.
Neither statement mentioned the Powell report, which came later, or any change to Huang’s role.
Any decision would sit with a board that, unusually, has no chair. Under its 2026 proxy statement, Nvidia uses an independent lead director instead: Stephen Neal, the former Cooley chief executive, who has been on the board since 2019 and chairs its nominating and corporate governance committee.
Brooke Seawell chairs the audit committee and Dawn Hudson chairs the compensation committee. Suzanne Nora Johnson joined in July, taking the board to 11 members.
Huang owned 3.58% of Nvidia’s shares as of March 23, the proxy shows, making him the largest individual holder. But he lacks the special voting rights that founders at Meta and Alphabet hold, the Financial Times reported, so he cannot control the board.
Not everyone expects an outright exit. “I don’t expect a ‘stay or go’ decision. It will be more like a ‘stay, with less’,” Jason Schloetzer, an associate professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, told Fortune before the Journal report.
Who sits around Huang?
Nvidia has never named a number two. Huang, 63, has been president and chief executive since co-founding the company in 1993, according to its latest annual report. He has said he has about 60 direct reports, TechCrunch noted.
The annual report lists four other executive officers, and one has since changed. Ajay “Jay” Puri, a 21-year Nvidia executive who ran worldwide field operations, told the company in June he would retire from that role, according to a July 2 filing. He remains in a senior advisory role.
The executive officers now are Colette Kress, executive vice president and chief financial officer since 2013, and Debora Shoquist, executive vice president of operations since 2009.
They are joined by Tim Teter, general counsel since 2017, and Nick Parker, a Microsoft veteran who joined in August as executive vice president of worldwide field operations, according to Nvidia’s executive biographies.
Co-founder Chris Malachowsky is an Nvidia Fellow and “a member of the executive staff”, his company biography says. Ian Buck, who joined in 2004 and is credited with inventing CUDA, is vice president of hyperscale and high-performance computing, according to his Nvidia profile.
On succession, the filings say little. The annual report warns that Nvidia is “highly dependent on the services of our longstanding executive team” and that failure to ensure “effective succession planning” could hurt it.
The proxy says only that Nvidia believes “in extensive leadership development”, and that having many senior managers work directly with the CEO gives the board “a pool of excellent candidates for future promotion”.
The names analysts are floating
Kress is the name raised most often, and mainly as a stopgap. Gil Luria of D.A. Davidson told Business Insider she is the company’s only other highly visible executive and could serve as interim CEO if Huang stepped aside.
Shawn Cole, president of executive search firm Cowen Partners, told CFO Dive on November 10 that naming Kress interim or co-CEO “would have a stabilizing impact on the business”.
For a longer-term technical leader, a former Nvidia employee quoted by Business Insider pointed to Buck. “He’s already running the group that is generating virtually all the revenues,” the person said, referring to the data centre business.
The Associated Press said speculation had turned to Malachowsky and Kress. Dan Morgan of Synovus Trust wrote in a note cited by Business Insider that Malachowsky “may be a part of the leadership change if Huang steps down”.
Business Insider also said unnamed observers had floated outsiders such as Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian and AWS CEO Matt Garman. Neither has been linked to Nvidia by any company or board source.
Some reports also mentioned Puri, but the July filing shows he has already stepped back from his executive role.
None of these people has been named by Nvidia or its board, and the Journal’s report, as relayed by Reuters, did not identify a successor.
What a forced exit could mean for the stock
Investors are weighing whether Nvidia’s lead depends on its founder. “Nvidia is not an ordinary company and Jensen is not an ordinary CEO; he IS Nvidia,” Bernstein analysts wrote, according to the Financial Times.
Others see the products as the anchor. “The new person coming in isn’t going to derail their product suite,” Chris Weston, head of research at Pepperstone, told Reuters after the Journal report.
On Invezz’s Zero Sum podcast, recorded before the Powell and Journal reports, Wealth Club’s Susannah Streeter called the idea that Huang’s downfall would sink Nvidia “completely overblown”.
The stock has already absorbed a sharp fall. From $215.38 on October 28, the day before the first Times report on Alice Huang, it closed 19.3% lower on Wednesday. The after-hours price is 25% below that level.
Part of that drop reflects a wider chip sell-off, as Invezz’s companion report on the Powell allegations sets out.
The next fixed dates are Nvidia’s third-quarter results call on November 17 at 5pm ET (10pm GMT), the company said, and a closed-door briefing that three House committee chairs asked Huang to give on November 18.
Until the board speaks, the ouster remains a report, not a decision, and Nvidia’s succession bench is defined more by job titles than by any plan the company has disclosed.
AI disclosure: AI tools assisted with research and drafting of this piece. An Invezz editor reviewed the facts, sources and wording before publication. Any opinions or analysis are Invezz’s, not those of an automated system.
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