SAN FRANCISCO: Jensen Huang, the leather-jacketed architect of the artificial intelligence boom, resigned as chief executive of Nvidia on Thursday after revelations of two extramarital affairs, including one with a woman accused of spying for China.

Chief financial officer Colette Kress, who joined Nvidia in 2013 after nearly 25 years at companies including Cisco and Microsoft, will serve as interim CEO while the board searches for a successor, ending Huang's 33 years at the helm of the company he co-founded.

Huang, 63, also gave up his board seat. Nvidia did not give a reason for his departure.

Huang was a central figure in the boom set off by the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT in 2022, with Nvidia's processors, once designed for video game graphics, becoming the crucial ingredient for building AI models.