Jensen Huang Resigns as Nvidia CEO, Ending an Immigrant's 33-Year Run

Jensen Huang, the Taiwan-born co-founder of Nvidia and one of the richest immigrants in America, resigned on Thursday, November 12, 2026. Nvidia’s board announced that Huang had stepped down as president, chief executive and board member, effective immediately, ending a 33-year run at the company he built into the backbone of the AI boom. Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress was named interim CEO, and longtime director Harvey C. Jones became the company’s first-ever board chair. Nvidia gave no reason for his departure.

His exit came two weeks after reports that he had an affair with a woman U.S. intelligence officials believe was gathering information for Beijing, and a day after reports of a second relationship with a senior Nvidia executive. Nvidia shares fell more than 14% at one point Thursday before closing down more than 4%.

For many immigrant engineers in Silicon Valley, Huang was more than a CEO. He arrived in the United States at 9, barely speaking English, and became the founder of one of the most valuable companies in history. His resignation ends, at least for now, one of the great immigrant stories in American business.

A “parachute kid” in rural Kentucky

Huang was born in Taiwan on February 17, 1963. When he was about 5, his family moved to Thailand for his father’s work at an oil refinery. In 1973, amid unrest in Thailand, his parents sent him and his older brother to live with an uncle and aunt in Tacoma, Washington. They were part of a wave of Taiwanese children sent ahead to America for school, often called “parachute kids.” Huang has never said publicly what visa he came on.

According to biographical accounts, his uncle and aunt enrolled the boys at the Oneida Baptist Institute in Oneida, Kentucky, believing it was a prestigious boarding school. It was a religious academy that took in troubled youth. His parents sold nearly everything they owned to pay the tuition. Huang cleaned the dormitory toilets every day, while his brother worked on a nearby tobacco farm. Too young for the academy’s classes, Huang attended the local public elementary school, where he was often bullied. His roommate was a 17-year-old with tattoos and knife scars. Huang taught him to read, and the roommate taught Huang to bench press.

About two years later, his parents immigrated and settled in Beaverton, Oregon, and the boys joined them.

Denny’s, Oregon State and a booth in East San Jose

At Aloha High School, Huang skipped two grades and graduated at 16. From 1978 to 1983 he worked the overnight shift at a local Denny’s as a dishwasher, busboy and waiter. He chose Oregon State University for its low in-state tuition and earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1984, with highest honors. There he met his lab partner, Lori, who became his wife.

He moved to Silicon Valley, designed microprocessors at AMD and later worked at LSI Logic. At night he studied at Stanford University, finishing a master’s degree in electrical engineering in 1992. At LSI he met engineers Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem. The three met at a Denny’s in East San Jose to plan a graphics chip company, and Nvidia was incorporated on April 5, 1993, with $600. Huang later became a naturalized U.S. citizen. Some sources say he also kept his Taiwanese citizenship, which Taiwan generally allows.

A company built by immigrants

Nvidia started with video game graphics cards. Its chips then turned out to be ideal for training AI systems, and the company grew into one of the most valuable businesses in history. By Thursday CNBC was describing it as a $4 trillion company, and it controls an estimated 90% of the market for advanced AI chips. In its fiscal year ending January 2026, Nvidia reported $215.9 billion in revenue and about 42,000 employees in the U.S. and 37 other countries, roughly three-quarters of them in research and development.

That workforce is heavily immigrant and Asian. Company diversity data compiled by Statista show that employees identifying as Asian or Indian make up about half of Nvidia’s U.S. workforce, with Hispanic or Latino employees at about 5%. Together that is more than 55%. Nvidia is also one of the country’s larger H-1B employers. In fiscal year 2025, according to USCIS employer data, it filed 1,781 H-1B petitions, including 560 approved petitions for new hires and 1,207 approved extensions and transfers for workers already on staff. It was also one of the few large tech companies whose H-1B filings kept rising this year, as we reported in October.

Huang made the link to his own life explicit. After President Trump imposed a $100,000 fee on new H-1B petitions in September 2025, Huang told employees Nvidia would keep sponsoring H-1B workers and pay all the fees. He wrote in that memo that “the miracle of Nvidia … would not be possible without immigration.”

He belongs to a short list of immigrants who rose to lead the most important companies in American tech. Sundar Pichai came from Chennai to study at Stanford and now runs Google and Alphabet. Satya Nadella came from Hyderabad for a master’s degree and runs Microsoft. Lisa Su, born in Taiwan and brought to the U.S. as a child, runs AMD, Nvidia’s main rival, and is a distant relative of Huang’s. Eric Yuan was denied a U.S. visa eight times before he made it to Silicon Valley and founded Zoom. Of that group, Huang was the founder who built his company from nothing. By early November he was worth about $148 billion, the 12th-richest person in the world on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, and he held the largest single stake in Nvidia.

How the spy story unfolded

The trouble started with Megaspeed International, a Singapore-based data center company and major Nvidia customer. The New York Times reported that U.S. authorities had been investigating Megaspeed since 2024 over whether it steered Nvidia chips to China in violation of export controls. Megaspeed has said there is no evidence of such exports.

One of Megaspeed’s early leaders was Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, a Chinese citizen who worked as a television reporter for Chinese state media and then as a private banker. She is not related to Jensen Huang. On October 29, the Times reported that U.S. intelligence agencies had concluded she was gathering information for Beijing and that her access to the Nvidia chief alarmed officials. Photos and video from Taipei in 2024 and 2025 showed the two together. In an interview that same day, Huang described their interactions as typical of those he had with Chinese customers. China’s Foreign Ministry called the spying claims baseless.

Reports about Singapore conflict. The Boston Globe reported that Singapore questioned Alice Huang last year and took her passport but found insufficient evidence of a crime. Singapore’s government has said that no investigation was conducted into her alleged ties to Jensen Huang or Chinese intelligence.

On November 5, the House Select Committee on China asked Huang to attend a closed-door briefing on November 18. On Sunday, November 8, he admitted the affair in an email to employees. “I was unfaithful to my wife,” he wrote. Nvidia’s board opened an independent investigation into whether he had been the target of a foreign intelligence effort, said it had no reason to believe national security or company secrets were compromised, and expressed confidence in his leadership. President Trump said the FBI was looking into the matter.

Then, late Wednesday, the Times reported a separate affair with a senior Nvidia executive who reported directly to Huang. According to CNBC, the board decided that night to remove him, and the resignation was announced the next day. The board said in its statement that “Jensen’s contributions to NVIDIA are profound.”

Nothing reported so far shows that Huang knowingly passed information to anyone. The evidence behind the U.S. intelligence assessment of Alice Huang has not been made public.

The boy from Oneida

It is a hard ending to one of the great immigrant stories in American business, and some of it is still unwritten: the FBI’s inquiry, the board’s review and the congressional briefing are all pending. But it would be a mistake to count Huang out. He remains Nvidia’s largest individual shareholder and one of the people who know the most about the technology the AI industry now runs on. Even as Huang resigned, President Trump said he had done “a fantastic job.” Few people understand how to build the hardware behind AI the way Huang does, and the industry may yet find a role for him.

He has started over before. The first time, he was 9 years old, cleaning toilets in a Kentucky dormitory, far from his parents, in a language he was still learning.

Sources

Vasanth Vaidyanathan, Esq.

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Vasanth Vaidyanathan is an immigration attorney with over 20 years of experience focused exclusively on U.S. immigration and nationality law. He holds an LL.M. from California Western School of Law, San Diego and advises individuals and businesses on employment and family-based immigration matters, including H-1B, PERM, EB categories, and adjustment of status. He has also been a featured speaker at immigration seminars across the U.S. To reach Vasanth visit: https://www.vnathan.com/

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