Nvidia’s CEO Quit After a Chinese Spy Scandal. Republicans Want Him in Front of Congress by Thanksgiving.

Jensen Huang built Nvidia from a booth at a Denny’s into the company whose chips run almost every big SI system on the planet. On Thursday morning he was gone from it, 33 years in, and the scandal that pushed him out is now headed to Capitol Hill.

Nvidia’s board announced Thursday that Huang “has resigned as President, Chief Executive Officer, and a member of the Board, effective immediately.” The company’s own SEC filing says the board accepted the resignation on Wednesday, Nov. 11. Chief financial officer Colette Kress, who has been at Nvidia since 2013, becomes interim CEO while keeping her finance job. Harvey C. Jones, a board member since 1993 and the former head of chip-design firm Synopsys, becomes the company’s first-ever chair of the board.

Here’s what’s new since we first reported that Huang admitted an affair with a woman U.S. intelligence believes was spying for China. He no longer runs the company, and the three Republican chairmen who demanded answers from him say quitting doesn’t end their questions.

A resignation the press release barely explains

Read the announcement and you’d never know anything went wrong. It is all thanks and continuity. “The Board and the company thank Jensen for his immeasurable contributions to the company and the industry,” it says. Jones promised that “operations, customer commitments and product roadmap” will “continue without interruption.” Kress said she is “committed to building on the extraordinary foundation Jensen created.”

What the release leaves out is the reason. Huang told employees on Nov. 8 that he had been unfaithful to his wife. The woman at the center of the national security part of the story is Alice Huang, a Chinese citizen and former senior executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore company that buys Nvidia’s top chips. She is no relation. U.S. intelligence agencies concluded she was working for China’s spy service, according to The New York Times, which broke the story. China calls that “purely unsubstantiated.” This week the Times also reported a second affair, with an Nvidia executive.

The board had opened an independent investigation on Nov. 8. Four days later, its founder was out.

Three chairmen, one letter, and a deadline

Republicans didn’t wait for Nvidia’s lawyers to finish. On Nov. 4, House Foreign Affairs Chairman Brian Mast of Florida, China Select Committee Chairman John Moolenaar of Michigan and Intelligence Committee Chairman Rick Crawford of Arkansas wrote to Huang asking for a closed-door briefing on Nvidia’s “security protocols against foreign adversary espionage” and his “interactions with a publicly reported People’s Republic of China (PRC) intelligence asset.” They gave him until Wednesday to answer.

He answered. “As of right now, we don’t have to subpoena because he came back last night and agreed to come in,” Mast told NBC News on Thursday. He said he expects the briefing “certainly before we depart for Thanksgiving.”

Moolenaar told reporters the two sides are “in discussions with him right now on a date to come and meet with us,” and made clear the chairmen aren’t bluffing. “If for some reason that were not to happen, all three committees, all three chairs have said we will use our subpoena power,” he said, according to CBS News. He added that the resignation “does change the dynamic,” but the goal hasn’t moved: get Huang in “as soon as possible” and “get to the bottom of the truth.”

Timing matters here. Republicans hold the House gavels until January, and these three chairmen own the committees that handle foreign policy, China and spying.

Moolenaar’s written statement was the sharpest thing anyone in Washington said all morning.

“Jensen Huang’s firing from the company he founded is an unfortunate end that could have been avoided,” he said. “It is in our national interest for NVIDIA and our other AI champions to succeed, but American companies should never jeopardize our nation’s security by giving Chinese companies access to their most advanced chips.” Then the ask: “Nvidia must now change its corporate practices and appoint leadership that makes national security its top priority.”

Notice what he didn’t say. He called Nvidia an American champion and said he wants it to win. That’s the right tone. The country needs this company strong. It just can’t have the company’s best hardware ending up in Beijing’s hands through a side door in Singapore.

The chip bill this could finally move

The bigger fight is over the law, not the man. China can’t legally buy Nvidia’s best chips, so it has worked the gaps: shell buyers, overseas data centers and rented computer time. Moolenaar wants export control fixes attached to the year-end defense bill, and his committee has spent the week pushing the MATCH Act to close those gaps.

Speaker Mike Johnson sounded like a man who expects the votes to show up now. “I’m in favor of limiting those exports, and I think there’s a developing consensus in Congress that that is an important position to take, especially given in the light of recent developments,” he told reporters, according to NBC News. “I think it might change a few minds around.” He called Huang’s exit “a big and shocking development” for a company that matters “not only in the U.S. economy but for national security purposes.”

Democrats piled on after the fact. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said resigning “was the right thing to do” and asked for a classified briefing. Sen. Elizabeth Warren said the resignation “does not absolve him.” But the letter with a deadline, and the briefing Huang just agreed to, came from the Republican chairmen.

President Trump, for his part, looked ahead. He wrote on Truth Social that Huang “has done a fantastic job” and that “there is only one man to take his place — TIM COOK of Apple. A Legend replaces a Legend!” Cook stepped down as Apple’s CEO in August and is now its executive chairman. The board says it will weigh inside and outside candidates.

Kress gets five days before her first test

The new boss doesn’t get a honeymoon. Nvidia reports quarterly earnings on Tuesday, Nov. 17, and Kress, who has handled those calls as finance chief for years, will now take every question as CEO too. Investors will want to hear that the chips keep shipping. Congress will want to hear that they’re shipping to the right people.

For Huang, the next room he walks into won’t be a keynote stage. It’ll be a closed hearing room with three Republican chairmen who wrote the letter that got him there.