Jensen Huang resigns from the company he co-founded in 1993, and the robot industry loses its loudest salesman. NVIDIA’s board accepted his resignation on Wednesday, November 11, as president, CEO and board member, effective immediately, and announced it on Thursday, November 12. Chief financial officer Colette Kress is interim CEO, and longtime director Harvey C. Jones becomes the board’s first-ever chair.
For most readers this is a stock-market and national-security story. For anyone building robots it’s a supply-chain question, because NVIDIA sells robot makers the simulator, the open models and the computer inside the robot, and it invests in a long list of robot startups. We checked what NVIDIA has shipped, what it has only promised, and what changed in the 24 hours after the announcement.
- What happened: Jensen Huang resigned as NVIDIA’s CEO and director; the board accepted it on November 11 and announced it on November 12, 2026. NVIDIA gave no reason.
- Who runs NVIDIA now: Colette Kress, CFO since 2013, is interim CEO and stays CFO while the board searches inside and outside the company.
- Robotics: the board says the product roadmap continues “without interruption.” On November 13 the GR00T 2 project page still said code arrives in December, and NVIDIA’s Hugging Face account kept publishing GR00T models after the news.
- The catch: shipped products like Jetson Thor don’t depend on who the CEO is. The promised ones, GR00T 2 code, the Hugging Face purchase and a reference humanoid due in early 2027, now ride on a new leadership team.
What NVIDIA announced, and what the filing adds
The release is short. Huang resigned as president, chief executive officer and member of the board, effective immediately. Kress, who joined NVIDIA as CFO in September 2013 after nearly 25 years in finance roles at companies including Cisco and Microsoft, “has agreed to serve as Interim Chief Executive Officer” and keeps the CFO job until a permanent successor is named. The board says it will consider internal and external candidates.
The Form 8-K adds two details. The board accepted the resignation on November 11, a day before the public announcement, and Kress is 59. It also says Jones, 73, has served on the board since 1993, NVIDIA’s founding year. He’s a former CEO and executive chairman of Synopsys and runs Square Wave Ventures, a family office.
Neither document gives a reason. The resignation follows days of news reports, summarized by TechCrunch and others, about Huang’s personal relationship with a business executive whom U.S. officials reportedly suspect of spying for China. Those are reported allegations, not findings. In a November 8 statement quoted by The Robot Report, Huang wrote that the board “has initiated an independent investigation” into the national security concerns raised in news reports, and that he would cooperate fully. TechCrunch reported NVIDIA shares down nearly 12% in early trading on Thursday.
NVIDIA kept its calendar. It still plans to report third-quarter fiscal 2027 results on Tuesday, November 17, at about 1:20 p.m. Pacific (4:20 p.m. Eastern), with the earnings call at 2 p.m. Pacific.
Why robot makers should care about who runs NVIDIA
Few robot companies can avoid NVIDIA. It sells the GPUs labs train on, the Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab simulators, the Cosmos world models and the open GR00T robot models, and the Jetson Thor computer that several humanoid makers build into their robots, which NVIDIA rates at up to 2,070 FP4 teraflops with 128 GB of memory at 40 to 130 watts. Our coverage this month shows how deep that goes. GR00T 2, announced November 9 at the Conference on Robot Learning, was pretrained largely on human video. Runway’s newly open Praxis-1 was scored on NVIDIA’s RoboLab-120 benchmark and lists Jetson Thor as an on-robot target. And NVIDIA’s reference humanoid for research labs, the Agile ONE SN, comes with GR00T software and a Jetson Thor computer built in.
Huang was the public face of all of it. He pitched “physical AI” from keynote stages and personally announced the Hugging Face deal in a September 3 blog post under his own name. The CEO-transition release, by contrast, describes NVIDIA only as “the world leader in AI and accelerated computing.” It doesn’t mention robotics once.
NVIDIA’s robotics promises, checked on November 13
The board’s line is that “operations, customer commitments and product roadmap” continue without interruption. We split NVIDIA’s robotics roadmap into what is already in developers’ hands and what is still a promise, and checked each item the morning after the announcement.
| Item | What NVIDIA said | Status on Nov 13, 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| GR00T 2 world action model | Announced November 9 at CoRL as an “open frontier world action model” | Promise. Whitepaper and 100,000 hours of human video are out; the project page still shows “Code Available in December.” No GR00T 2 weights on NVIDIA’s Hugging Face page. |
| GR00T N1.7 open models | Open vision-language-action model with downloadable checkpoints | Shipping. NVIDIA’s Hugging Face account updated six N1.7 checkpoints on November 10 and two GR00T reference-workflow models on November 12 at about 2:58 p.m. ET, hours after the announcement. |
| Isaac Lab 3.0 | “Latest release” of the open-source robot-learning framework, with the Newton physics engine | Shipping. NVIDIA claims up to 2.5x the training throughput of Isaac Lab 2.3 with PhysX in one vision-based dexterity benchmark. |
| Jetson Thor | Up to 2,070 FP4 teraflops and 128 GB of memory; T5000 and T4000 modules | Shipping. Product page live and unchanged. |
| Agile ONE SN reference humanoid | Research humanoid built by Agile Robots on NVIDIA’s stack | Promise. Due early 2027; no price published. |
| Hugging Face acquisition | About $11.9 billion purchase price plus up to about $1.0 billion in retention equity ($12.93 billion in Huang’s post) | Pending. The 8-K expects a close in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approvals. Reuters has reported a Justice Department inquiry. |
The pattern is clear enough. Everything a robot maker can download or buy today kept working on November 12 and 13. The three items with a future date are the ones a new leadership team could reprioritize. The Hugging Face deal matters to robotics specifically because Hugging Face runs LeRobot and Pollen Robotics, the open-source robot tooling a lot of small labs build on, and NVIDIA’s own September 2 filing commits it to keeping the platform open to other chip vendors.
NVIDIA’s money in robot startups
NVIDIA is also a shareholder in a good part of the field. Our robotics funding tracker lists NVIDIA or its venture arm, NVentures, as an investor in these 2026 rounds, based on the companies’ and investors’ own announcements:
| Date | Company | Round | NVIDIA’s role |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 14 | Skild AI (robot AI models) | Close to $1.4 billion at over $14 billion | NVentures participated |
| Jun 4 | Generalist AI (robot AI models) | $400 million | Participant |
| Jun 10 | NEURA Robotics (humanoids, Germany) | Series C of “up to $1.4 billion” | Participant |
| Jul 15 | Walden Robotics (industrial robots) | $300 million seed at $1.1 billion | Participant |
| Oct 7 | Mecka (robot training data) | $60 million Series B | Participant |
| Nov 12 | Agile Robots (humanoids, arms) | $500 million Series F at $8.5 billion | Participant, announced the same day Huang’s exit was |
Not on that list: a reported discussion about NVIDIA investing another $1 billion in Figure AI, which neither company has announced. These stakes don’t vanish with a CEO change. But they show how much of the humanoid business has NVIDIA on both sides of the deal, as supplier and investor, and that concentration is what makes Huang’s exit a robotics story at all.
Our take: the stack doesn’t need Huang, but its timelines might
Our read is that robot makers shouldn’t expect anything they already run to change. Jetson Thor modules, GR00T N1.7 checkpoints and Isaac Lab don’t stop working because a CEO left, and NVIDIA’s robotics team was visibly still publishing on November 12. Kress also isn’t an outsider. She has been CFO since 2013, through the years in which NVIDIA built Jetson, Isaac and GR00T.
The exposure is in the dated promises. GR00T 2’s code is due in December. The Hugging Face purchase, which would put LeRobot under NVIDIA, has to clear regulators by mid-2027. The Agile ONE SN is due in early 2027. Each was announced under a founder who championed physical AI personally, and an interim CEO who is also running finance may weigh them differently against NVIDIA’s far larger data-center business. A second risk is China. The allegations reported around Huang involve China, and if they lead to tighter U.S. rules on NVIDIA’s China business, Chinese humanoid makers that build on Jetson and Isaac could feel it before anyone else. The Robot Report notes that AMD, Qualcomm, Arm and Intel may pitch themselves as alternative suppliers. That is plausible, not yet visible.
Two events would change this assessment quickly. The first is the November 17 earnings call: if Kress restates the robotics roadmap and the GR00T 2 timing, the dated promises look safer. The second is December itself. If GR00T 2 code lands on schedule, the robotics roadmap survived its first test without Huang.
Frequently asked questions
Did Jensen Huang resign from NVIDIA?
Yes. NVIDIA said on November 12, 2026, that Jensen Huang resigned as president, chief executive officer and a member of the board, effective immediately. Its Form 8-K says the board accepted the resignation on November 11.
Who is NVIDIA’s CEO now?
Colette Kress, NVIDIA’s executive vice president and chief financial officer since 2013, is interim CEO. She keeps the CFO role until the board names a permanent CEO, and the board says it will consider internal and external candidates.
Why did Jensen Huang resign?
NVIDIA’s release and filing don’t give a reason. The resignation followed news reports about Huang’s relationship with a person U.S. officials reportedly suspect of spying for China, and Huang said on November 8 that the board had opened an independent investigation. Those reports are allegations, not findings.
Will NVIDIA still release GR00T 2?
NVIDIA hasn’t changed the plan publicly. On November 13, 2026, the GR00T 2 project page still said “Code Available in December,” and the board says the product roadmap will continue without interruption. No GR00T 2 weights were on NVIDIA’s Hugging Face page yet.
Does Huang’s resignation affect robots that use Jetson Thor?
Not directly. Jetson Thor is a shipping product, and robots already built on it keep working. The open questions are about future items, such as GR00T 2 code, the Hugging Face acquisition and the Agile ONE SN reference humanoid, and about possible tighter U.S. rules on NVIDIA’s China business.
Sources
- NVIDIA Newsroom: “NVIDIA Announces CEO Transition,” November 12, 2026
- NVIDIA Form 8-K (event date November 11, 2026), Item 5.02
- NVIDIA Form 8-K on the Hugging Face agreement (event date September 2, 2026), Item 8.01
- NVIDIA Blog: “NVIDIA to Acquire Hugging Face,” by Jensen Huang, September 3, 2026
- NVIDIA Blog: “Practice Makes Precise: At CoRL, NVIDIA and Partners Reveal How Robots Rehearse Delicate Work in Simulation,” November 9, 2026
- NVIDIA GEAR: GR00T 2 project page (checked November 13, 2026)
- NVIDIA on Hugging Face: model list (checked November 13, 2026)
- NVIDIA: Jetson Thor product page
- TechCrunch: “Nvidia’s Jensen Huang resigns, chipmaker names CFO Colette Kress as interim CEO,” by Ram Iyer and Julie Bort, November 12, 2026
- Reuters (via Investing.com): “Exclusive: US DOJ is inquiring about Nvidia’s purchase of Hugging Face, sources say”
- The Robot Report: “NVIDIA replaces CEO amid China AI and robotics concerns,” by Eugene Demaitre, November 12, 2026
- Agile Robots: Series F announcement naming NVIDIA as a participant, November 12, 2026
- NVIDIA on YouTube: “Accelerating Humanoid Robot Development With NVIDIA Isaac GR00T,” June 1, 2026
All sources accessed November 13, 2026.
Last updated: November 13, 2026. To report an error, see our corrections page. See our editorial policy.
