Nvidia's board announced on Thursday that Jensen Huang has resigned as president, CEO and director, effective immediately, ending a 33-year run at the company he co-founded. Chief financial officer Colette Kress becomes interim CEO while keeping her finance role, and former Synopsys chief Harvey C. Jones becomes the board's first-ever chair. The exit follows disclosures that Huang had two extramarital affairs, one with a woman US intelligence agencies suspect was a Chinese asset. Nvidia shares fell 7.5% in after-hours trading, and the company reports quarterly results on November 17.
Nvidia shares rose about 4.5% in premarket trading on Wednesday, recovering part of a two-day slide that took the stock down 4.3% on Monday and 5.5% on Tuesday. The company has hired the law firm Wachtell Lipton to investigate whether a personal relationship involving chief executive Jensen Huang compromised company secrets or national security. Huang denies wrongdoing and Beijing has rejected the spying claims. Lawmakers have asked him to brief Congress on 18 November, a day after Nvidia reports quarterly results. The stock is still valued near $5 trillion, and AI hardware names remain the market's largest single source of index risk.
Google announced two new systems in its eighth-generation Tensor Processing Unit lineup, the TPU 8tx and TPU 8i Max, both due to be available next year. The 8tx uses hardware-level confidential computing so customer data and model weights stay isolated while a model runs, and pairs TPU 8t silicon with AMD's fifth-generation EPYC processors. The 8i Max packs two TPU 8i chips into one package, doubling compute, on-chip SRAM and high-bandwidth memory throughput in the same rack footprint. Google says nearly 100 customers use its TPUs, and the launch widens its challenge to Nvidia in AI accelerators. Both systems are due on the market next year, and neither is an entirely new silicon design.
Nvidia's board has opened an independent investigation after chief executive Jensen Huang told staff he had a romantic relationship with a Chinese businesswoman whom US intelligence suspects of spying for Beijing. Huang apologised to his family in an email sent on Sunday and said he would cooperate fully. The woman, Alice Huang, is a former executive at Megaspeed International, a Singapore-based Nvidia customer suspected of diverting restricted AI chips to China. The board said it has no reason to believe company secrets or national security were compromised, and Huang remains chief executive. Nvidia shares fell sharply on Monday as investors weighed the export control implications of the case.
The US Commerce Department has approved dozens of Chinese companies to handle Nvidia's H200 chips, according to reporting by the New York Times, including some with ties to firms under national security sanctions. Several approved entities were listed at addresses that appeared to be empty offices. The approvals raise questions about how export licences are checked once they are granted.
South Korea plans to spend 21.3 trillion won, about $16 billion, on semiconductors, physical AI and AI data centers in 2027, nearly double this year's 10.8 trillion won allocation. President Lee Jae-myung presented the figure inside a record 820.9 trillion won budget, up 12.8%, that also sets aside 4.7 trillion won for a sovereign AI model and money to train 2,000 chip-design specialists. About 2 trillion won goes to expanding production capacity and 2.1 trillion to power, water and industrial-complex infrastructure. Defense spending rises 8.2% to 73.3 trillion won. Lawmakers must still approve the package.
At least 14 Ohio municipalities passed bans or restrictions on data centers in the November 3 election, out of 18 that voted on the question. Ten towns approved outright bans, while others added voter-approval requirements for large projects. In Ashville, 82 percent of voters reversed a council deal with EdgeConneX for two campuses. The votes do not end AI demand but change where and how fast capacity can be built.
AMD is paying about US$2.9 billion for Taalas, a three-year-old Toronto startup that builds silicon tuned for a single AI model, according to a filing analysis published this week. Up to US$1.4 billion of the price is contingent on milestones. Taalas raised more than US$225 million from investors including Fidelity, and its chief executive previously founded Tenstorrent. The deal, first announced in August, is one of the largest takeovers of a Canadian private tech company and shows where the chip race has moved: away from training and toward cheaper, faster inference.
Communities in ten states voted on 41 local measures dealing with data centers, and voters sided against the projects in all but one, according to Ballotpedia data analyzed by CNBC. The votes ranged from outright bans to caps on electricity use, with Ohio alone holding 21 measures. The issue moved races up and down the ballot: Sherrod Brown beat Senator Jon Husted in Ohio after calling him the face of data centers, and Gina Hinojosa unseated Texas Governor Greg Abbott. A CNBC voter poll found 56% of voters said data centers were a major factor in their decision.
Data centres built for AI workloads now consume an estimated 70% of the world's memory chip output, according to IDC, and the three companies that control more than 95% of DRAM production have shifted capacity toward high-bandwidth memory. HBM takes about 23% of DRAM wafers, leaving consumer-grade DRAM and NAND flash short. DRAM prices have roughly doubled since early 2025, and IDC expects PC, tablet and smartphone prices to rise 10% to 20% by the end of 2026. Smartphone shipments are projected to fall 12.9% and the PC market 11.3%. New wafer capacity takes years to build, so analysts expect tight supply into 2027.