Welcome to Staten News — where the AI industry's loudest salesman left the building and its banker got the keys.
Thirty-three years. That's how long Nvidia had Jensen Huang. On Thursday the board announced he had resigned as president, CEO and director, effective immediately, after a week of reports about his personal relationships, including one with a Megaspeed executive U.S. officials reportedly believe is a Chinese intelligence asset. Huang has denied compromising national security or Nvidia's secrets, per CNBC.
A person familiar with the matter told CNBC the board made the call Wednesday night, after a report of a second alleged relationship turned the room fast.
The replacement isn't an engineer. It's the CFO.
🧾 The CFO Era
Colette Kress joined Nvidia as CFO in September 2013 after nearly 25 years in finance at Cisco and Microsoft, per the company's release. She keeps that job while serving as interim CEO. Harvey Jones, the former Synopsys CEO, becomes the first chair Nvidia's board has ever had.
That last detail matters more than it sounds. Before Thursday, Huang was one of 11 directors on a board with no chair, per CNBC. None of the other 10 are current or former S&P 500 CEOs, and they've averaged 15 years on the board. Across the S&P 500, the average independent director has served 7.8 years, per Conference Board data CNBC cited.
Now look at what Kress inherits. As of its July filing, Nvidia had $36 billion in off-balance-sheet backstops for neoclouds and $20 billion in leases signed to rent out data center capacity, per CNBC. On top of that sits the $105 billion backstop it offered OpenAI in August to rent SB Energy's planned Ohio data center campus. The Information reported that Kress was against that deal.
The executive who reportedly argued against the biggest check now decides whether to write the next one.
That's not a succession plan. That's the credit committee taking the wheel.
💸 The Portfolio Felt It First
Over the past year Nvidia put $5 billion into Intel and roughly $2 billion apiece into Nebius, Marvell, Lumentum, Coherent and CoreWeave. Intel and Marvell both fell more than 4% Thursday. Coherent slid about 4%, Lumentum 5%, CoreWeave about 9%. Its $12.9 billion Hugging Face acquisition, which CNBC has reported the Justice Department is probing, is still expected to close in the first half of 2027.
The first real test of the checkbook comes next week. Anthropic plans to list on the Nasdaq as "ANT" on Nov. 19, and Nvidia has agreed to buy another $10 billion of its stock right after the offering, per the amended prospectus CNBC cited.
⚔️ Who's Circling
AMD is the obvious winner on paper. Its Helios racks compete directly with Nvidia's Vera Rubin systems, and Helios is already deployed at Anthropic, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and Oracle, per CNBC. Futurum Group CEO Daniel Newman put a ceiling on the hype: if everyone switched tomorrow, AMD couldn't supply them.
Then there's the job itself. Creative Strategies CEO Ben Bajarin named Ian Buck, who runs Nvidia's data center business, as the most logical permanent pick and said an insider beats an outsider. Trump has his own candidate. He posted on Truth Social that Apple's Tim Cook should take the job.
China is where the fallout gets strange. Alibaba fell about 7% in Hong Kong on reports it was a Megaspeed customer. One trader told CNBC that people moving Nvidia chips into China were told to pause until next week. Listings put an eight-GPU set of still-banned Blackwell B300s at 20 million yuan, about $2.99 million, nearly six times the official U.S. price of $550,000.
Read that last number again.
🏛️ Washington Wants Its Turn
House Foreign Affairs Chair Brian Mast said Huang has agreed to testify before Thanksgiving, likely under oath, with the date still being negotiated. Senate Banking Chair Tim Scott asked Huang to testify publicly on Dec. 3. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, in line to be speaker when Democrats take both chambers in January, called for a classified briefing.
Few tech executives had as much access to this White House as Huang did. Kress walks into a capital about to be run by the party investigating the scandal.
📅 The Calendar
Tue, Nov. 17: Nvidia third-quarter fiscal 2027 results, about 1:20 p.m. PT, call at 2 p.m. PT
Wed, Nov. 18: APEC leaders' meeting in Shenzhen, with Trump attending
Thu, Nov. 19: Anthropic's planned Nasdaq debut
Before Thanksgiving: Huang's House testimony, date not set
Dec. 3: Senate Banking's requested public hearing with Huang
Tuesday is the first earnings call in Nvidia's history as a public company without Jensen Huang as CEO.
Sources: Nvidia CEO transition release, CNBC Nvidia live updates
— The Bandicoots 🧾⚡