Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has resigned, and chief financial officer Colette Kress has assumed the role for the moment, Gary Marcus reported on his Substack newsletter on 12.11.2026. According to Marcus, the company's board met and presumably told Huang he had to go, though the exact circumstances were not detailed. Nvidia shares were tumbling as he wrote: down 8 percent in premarket trading and 13 percent at the opening bell.
In Marcus's assessment, Huang was one of the greatest CEOs in history. He writes that he met Huang several times, the first around 2014, when Huang had already seen that Nvidia's future lay in AI and was working at full throttle to embed the company as deeply as possible in it. Marcus says he grew frustrated in recent years with what he saw as Huang's increasing tendency to hype things, and that the circular financing arrangements worried him, but he adds that he never stopped marveling at the pivot from powering video games to powering the AI revolution.
Even so, Marcus argues, Huang had to go. He alleges that Huang enabled and even lobbied for Chinese AI, subverted US policy, and carelessly left himself vulnerable to both blackmail and espionage. In Marcus's telling, Huang's blindness to conflicts of interest, or the appearance of them, cost many people dearly and put his company, his industry, and his country in peril. He also writes that Huang left Nvidia open to endless litigation and investigation, which may be part of why the board pressed him out despite his enormous talents. Replacing him will be a huge blow, Marcus writes, but keeping him on was no longer tenable either.
Writing on 11.11.2026 in anticipation of this outcome, Marcus had warned: "If Jensen is indeed on his way out—and Nvidia may really not have much choice to let him go given the potential liability and reputational damage, to say nothing of the scrutiny from investigations if they don't act—all hell may break loose." He also described Huang as "the ringmaster of all the insane circular financing" in the AI world and said all of it might collapse, a possibility he now considers very real. He added that a big immediate question was whether an Nvidia under an acting CEO would still go through with the billions it promised Anthropic in the IPO.
Looking ahead, Marcus expects congressional investigations to continue, raises the possibility of a market crash, and names China as perhaps the biggest immediate winner. China hawks will come out in force, he writes, and the politics will be intense, with Lutnick and Trump potentially caught in the crossfire. The main thing to expect, he concludes, is chaos.