Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang steps down after board decision

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has stepped down following a decision by the company's board, according to TechCrunch. The departure removes the executive who has served as the public face of Nvidia's AI strategy at a time when the chipmaker is expanding deeper into software, acquisitions and industry-wide initiatives.

Nvidia had agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. The deal is expected to close in the first half of next year, subject to regulatory approval.

The company also launched the Open Agent Safety Platform together with more than 100 companies, an effort that depends on coordination across the AI industry.

TechCrunch reported that Huang's departure could unsettle Nvidia's AI policy and its role in industry coordination, describing the company as having lost its top salesperson and the AI industry as having lost its strongest hype man.

Wider commitments

In August, Nvidia said it would provide loss-protection-style support for $105 billion in financing for OpenAI's Ohio data center. In the same month, major private equity and financial firms including Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR agreed to invest up to $500 billion in data center construction.

In July, Huang organized an industry-wide support letter after reports that Anthropic and OpenAI asked the Trump administration to ban Chinese open-weight models, and hundreds of tech companies signed it. As of July, Nvidia had committed roughly $750 billion in circular deals in which it invests in customers who then buy its chips, according to Bloomberg.