Jensen Huang resigns as Nvidia CEO, open-source AI loses its biggest backer

Teams that pick an open-weight model over a paid API have had one quiet ally. That ally was the CEO of the company that makes the chips both sides run on. That changed today.

Nvidia said on 12 November that Jensen Huang has resigned. He stepped down as president, CEO and board member, effective immediately. Finance chief Colette Kress is interim CEO. Harvey C. Jones is the company's first ever board chair. "The Board has full confidence in Colette and the leadership team," Jones said in the Nvidia press release. He said the board expects operations, customer commitments and the product roadmap to continue without interruption. TechCrunch reports that Huang left after admitting an affair with Alice Huang, who it describes as an alleged Chinese spy.

What the open-source side loses

Huang was the most public open-source backer at a top chip maker. TechCrunch lists four moves his name is on. First is the pending $12.9 billion Nvidia deal to buy Hugging Face. That deal is still on track to close in the first half of 2027. Second is Nvidia's Nemotron family of open-weight models. TechCrunch says Huang pushed for them, and they are built for long-running agents and reasoning. Third is a $6 billion non-exclusive license for Poolside's AI coding technology. Fourth is an open letter Huang wrote earlier this year. It was signed by 25 companies, including Microsoft, Meta, IBM and Palantir. The letter asked the US government not to over-restrict open-weight AI models.

Nathan Lambert, an open-source advocate, put the concern directly on X. "Jensen no longer being CEO would be very very bad for the open model cause in the US," he wrote.

What Hugging Face says

Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue said on X that the company will keep fighting for open-source AI. He called Huang's departure "a really sad day" and said "this whole thing sucks", TechCrunch reports. "We'll keep fighting for open-source AI, harder than ever," Delangue wrote. "This is too important to slow down now." He said the Nvidia acquisition is still on course to close. He said it will close in the first half of 2027.

What Kress said about the plan

Kress said in the same press release that Nvidia will keep going on the path Huang set. "We will continue advancing the work that has made NVIDIA a leader in accelerated computing and AI," she said. She also said the company will execute on the opportunities ahead. The release does not name open-source AI or the Hugging Face and Poolside deals. Nvidia reports Q3 fiscal 2027 results on 17 November.

A new CEO rarely cuts the biggest in-flight deals. So the Hugging Face purchase and the Poolside license are the two to watch. Open-weight releases like Nemotron are the softer part of the roadmap. A board can pull them back without breaking a signed contract. A team that picked Nemotron because the vendor backed open weights now holds that bet on a new signature.

Source

• Nvidia, Nvidia announces CEO transition, the primary announcement.
• Rebecca Bellan at TechCrunch, Jensen Huang's exit puts Nvidia's support for open source in question.
• Rebecca Bellan at TechCrunch, Hugging Face CEO vows to keep fighting for open source AI after Jensen Huang's exit.