The Brief

Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger blasted President Trump's policies and invoked a civic call for Americans to push for better leadership, in a rebuttal to the State of the Union that offered a preview of how Democrats plan to message against the GOP in this year's midterm elections.

"In his speech tonight, the president did what he always does, he lied, he scapegoated and he distracted, and he offered no real solutions to our nation's pressing challenges, so many of which he is actively making worse," Spanberger said.

Speaking from Colonial Williamsburg as the nation approaches its 250th anniversary, the recently sworn in governor structured her address around three questions: "Is the president working to make life more affordable for you and your family? Is the president working to keep Americans safe, both at home and abroad? Is the president working for you?"

Spanberger, who previously served in Congress for six years, became the first woman elected governor of Virginia in November, flipping control of the office from Republican to Democrat. Prior to her career on Capitol Hill, she served in the CIA.

Her gubernatorial race was under the national spotlight as one of the first major indicators of voters' political leanings during the second Trump administration. Spanberger focused her campaign on affordability, a message Democrats continue to embrace ahead of the midterm elections and one that featured heavily in her roughly 13-minute speech.

"As I campaigned for governor last year, I traveled to every corner of Virginia and I heard the same pressing concern everywhere: costs are too high — in housing, health care, energy and child care," she said, underlining that Democrats "across the country are laser focused on affordability."

She slammed what she called Trump's "reckless trade policies."

"Americans are paying the price," she said, "and even though the Supreme Court struck these tariffs down four days ago, the damage to us, the American people, has already been done."

She also spoke about the violence from federal immigration enforcement officers in American streets.

"Our broken immigration system is something to be fixed, not an excuse for unaccountable agents to terrorize our communities," she said.

She also centered a portion of her speech on the theme of corruption within the Trump administration — which she called "unprecedented."

"There's the coverup of the Epstein files, the crypto scams, cozying up to foreign princes for airplanes and billionaires for ballrooms, putting his name and face on buildings all over our nation's capital," she said. "This is not what our founders envisioned."

The rebuttal to a president's State of the Union is considered an honor, given the high-profile nature of the speech. The selection tends to reflect what party leaders see as top policy priorities and which rising star they regard as the best spokesperson to deliver that message to the public.

"National Democrats want people to think about folks like Abigail Spanberger as core to the Democratic message," said Joel Payne, a longtime Democratic strategist. "Spanberger was one of the big Democratic success stories of 2025. She comes from a state that represents lots of parts of the Democratic coalition, a state that's purple, that's relevant in national politics — and that had a big political moment in the last year when they responded to Trump's agenda around DOGE."

Democrats are eager to replicate Spanberger's political success during this election cycle. She was part of a blue wave of Democrats in 2018 who flipped control of the House. She's considered a more moderate voice within the party.

She's recently faced criticism from conservatives who allege she is veering left after leading a more centrist campaign.

A tough gig 

The job of delivering the official response to the State of the Union can be tough.

Take then-Sen. Marco Rubio (now secretary of state), who delivered a response in both English and Spanish in 2013. His speech is mainly remembered by a singular moment when he went off camera to get a water bottle.

More recently, Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., was mocked for her speech's intense tone and the choice to deliver the response against the backdrop of her kitchen.

"It's very hard to match the pomp and circumstance and to match the bully pulpit of the president on a night where most of the country is paying attention to him," Payne said. "Spanberger acquitted herself very well, not only because of the content, which really spoke to the frustration of millions of Americans but in temperament, sounding like a grown up."

Payne said the simplicity of the message and the clarity of the delivery made for an effective speech.

"She talked about very crisp, easy to grasp themes," he said. "She offered very clear questions, clear points of contrast and offered specific examples of how Trump is falling short."

The Spanish language Democratic response

California Sen. Alex Padilla, a key figure in his party's fight against the administration's immigration policies, gave Democrats' Spanish language response to Trump's speech. Last summer, Padilla was thrust into the center of the debate over enforcement after he was forcibly removed from a DHS press conference while attempting to question Secretary Kristi Noem.

Padilla relived the moment in his speech.

"They may have knocked me down for a moment, but I got right back up," the California Democrat said in Spanish. "As our parents taught us, if you fall seven times, get up eight. I am still here. Standing. Still fighting. And I know you are still standing and still fighting too."

Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., speaks during the ICE Out for Good protest at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection office on Jan. 13 in Washington, D.C.

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Jemal Countess

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The son of Mexican immigrants said the administration had weaponized federal immigration officers, forced the increase of grocery and housing prices and is threatening to interfere in the November midterm elections.

Padilla, the first Latino to represent California in the Senate, was appointed to the seat in 2021 after the seat was vacated by Kamala Harris. He won his first six-year term the following year.

Some Democrats were absent from the chamber 

As has been the case during previous Trump addresses to Congress, some Democrats chose to skip the speech entirely and engage in counter-programming.

Temperatures were below freezing on the National Mall, where a stage was set up with the illuminated U.S. Capitol dome as the backdrop. The "People's State of the Union," sponsored by the progressive advocacy groups MoveOn.org and Meidas Touch, featured upwards of 30 members of Congress who skipped Trump's speech.

Among the lawmakers who addressed the crowd was Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn.

"I am not at the State of the Union speech tonight, because Donald Trump is making a mockery of this great institution, and he doesn't deserve an audience," said Murphy. "These are not normal times, and Democrats have to stop behaving normally."

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., speaks during the "People's State of the Union" on the National Mall on Tuesday night.

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Ken Cedeno

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The event not only featured remarks from lawmakers but from community leaders as well. Payne, who serves as chief communications officer for Move On, said the intention was to shine a spotlight on constituents.

"We wanted to make sure that those folks were the stars of tonight — whether it's people who've been impacted by DOGE cuts, people who've been impacted by the priorities that were laid out in Donald Trump's 'big, beautiful bill,' or people who've been impacted by this immigration regime," Payne said.

One such speaker was Dr. Jenna Norton, a whistleblower who was placed on administrative leave from the National Institutes of Health last fall after voicing alarm about funding and staffing cuts at the agency.

"The Trump administration put research participants and public health at risk when they abruptly terminated NIH studies," said Norton. "By halting these studies, they also wasted taxpayer resources. When you halt a $5 million study four years in, you don't save a million dollars, you waste $4 million."

Lawmakers reiterated calls for significant changes at the Department of Homeland Security, following the killing of two U.S. citizens in Minnesota by immigration agents last month. As Trump delivered his State of the Union address, DHS remains shut down.

NPR's Claudia Grisales and Don Gonyea contributed to this report. 

Read Spanberger's Democratic response to President Trump's State of the Union address

ABIGAIL SPANBERGER: Good evening. Good evening and welcome to Historic Williamsburg. We are gathered here in the chambers of the House of Burgesses. In 1705, the people of the Virginia Colony gathered here to take on the extraordinary task of governing themselves. Before there was a Declaration of Independence, a Constitution or a Bill of Rights, there were people in this room.

The people who served here ultimately dreamed of what a new nation unlike anything the world had ever seen could be. The United States was founded on the idea that ordinary people could reject the unacceptable excesses of poor leadership, band together to demand better of their government and create a nation that would be an example for the world.

[Applause] And this year, as we celebrate 250 years since America declared our independence from tyranny, I can think of no better place to speak to you as we reflect on the current state of our union. Tonight, as we watched our nation's lawmakers gather for a joint session of Congress, we did not hear the truth from our president.

So let's speak plainly and honestly and let me ask you, the American people watching at home, three questions. Is the president working to make life more affordable for you and your family? Is the president working to keep Americans safe both at home and abroad? Is the president working for you? As I campaigned for governor last year, I traveled to every corner of Virginia and I heard the same pressing concern everywhere, costs are too high, in housing, health care, energy and child care.

And I know these same conversations are being had all across this country. Because since this president took office last year, his reckless trade policies have forced American families to pay more than $1,700 each in tariff costs. Small businesses have suffered. Farmers have suffered, some losing entire markets.

Everyday Americans are paying the price and even though the Supreme Court struck these tariffs down four days ago, the damage to us, the American people, has already been done. Meanwhile, the president is planning for new tariffs, another massive tax hike on you and your family. And Republicans in Congress, they remain unwilling to assert their constitutional authority to stop him.

They're making your life harder. They're making your life more expensive. They're even making it more difficult to see a doctor. Rural health clinics in Virginia and across the country are already closing their doors, thanks to the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, championed by the president and Republicans in Congress.

And tonight, the president celebrated this law, the one threatening rural hospitals, stripping health care for millions of Americans and driving up costs in energy and housing, all while cutting food programs for hungry kids. But here in Virginia, I am working with our state legislature to lower costs and make the Commonwealth more affordable.

[Applause] And it's not just me. Democrats across the country are laser focused on affordability in our nation's capital and in state capitals and communities across America. In the most innovative and exceptional nation in the history of the world, Americans deserve to know that their leaders are focused on addressing the problems that keep them up at night, problems that dictate where you live, whether you can afford to start a business or whether you have to skip a prescription in order to buy groceries.

So I'll ask again, is the president working to make life more affordable for you and your family? We all know the answer is no. I grew up in a house of service. My mother was a nurse and my father was a career law enforcement officer. I began my career by following in my father's footsteps as a federal agent, working money laundering and narcotics cases.

I worked side by side with local and state police to keep our community safe and to uphold and enforce the law. Law enforcement officers across the country know that it is a unique responsibility to do the serious work of investigating crimes, comforting victims and making arrests. It's about building trust and that requires an abiding sense of duty and commitment to community.

And yet, our president has sent poorly trained federal agents into our cities where they have arrested and detained American citizens and people who aspire to be Americans, and they have done it without a warrant. They have ripped nursing mothers away from their babies. They have sent children, a little boy in a blue bunny hat, children, to far off detention centers and they have killed American citizens in our streets.

And they have done it all with their faces masked from accountability. Every minute spent sowing fear is a minute not spent investigating murders, crimes against children or the criminals defrauding seniors of their life savings. Our president told us tonight that we are safer, because these agents arrest mothers and detain children?

ABIGAIL SPANBERGER: Think about that, our broken immigration system is something to be fixed, not an excuse for unaccountable agents to terrorize our communities. [Applause] After working in law enforcement, I continued my career of service as a CIA officer, working undercover to protect the United States and our allies from global threats, terrorism, nuclear weapons and the aggression of adversarial nations around the globe.

But as the president spoke of his perceived successes tonight, he continues to cede economic power and technological strength to Russia, bow down to — to China, bow down to a Russian dictator and make plans for war with Iran. Here's the truth, over the last year through DOGE, mass firings and the appointment of deeply unserious people to our nation's most serious positions, our president has endangered the long and storied history of the United States of America being a force for good.

So I'll ask again, is the president working to keep Americans safe both at home and abroad? We all know the answer is no. In his speech tonight, the president did what he always does; he lied, he scapegoated and he distracted and he offered no real solutions to our nation's pressing challenges, so many of which he is actively making worse.

He tries to divide us, he tries to enrage us, to pit us against one another, neighbor against neighbor. And sometimes he succeeds. And so you have to ask, who benefits from his rhetoric, his policies, his actions, the short list of laws he's pushed through this Republican Congress? Somebody must be benefiting.

He's enriching himself, his family, his friends. The scale of the corruption is unprecedented. There's the cover up of the Epstein files, the crypto scams, cozying up to foreign princes for airplanes and billionaires for ballrooms, putting his name and face on buildings all over our nation's capital. This is not what our founders envisioned, not by a long shot.

[Applause] So I'll ask again, is the president working for you? We all know the answer is no. But here's the special thing about America. On our 250th anniversary, we know better than any nation what is possible when ordinary citizens like those who once dreamed right here in this room reject the unacceptable and demand more of their government.

We see it in the determination of students organizing school walkouts all across the country, whose voices are becoming so powerful that the governor of Texas seeks to silence them. We see it in the bravery of Americans in Minnesota standing up for their communities, from peacefully protesting in subzero temperatures to carpooling children to school, so that their immigrant parents are not ripped away from them in the parking lot.

As a mother of three school-age daughters, I am inspired by their bravery, but I am sickened that it is necessary. And Americans across the country are taking action. They are going to the ballot box to reject this chaos. With their votes, they are writing a new story, a more hopeful story. In November, I won my election by 15 points.

[Applause] And we won 13 new seats in our state legislature. [Applause] Because voters decided they wanted something different. Our campaign earned votes from Democrats, Republicans, independents and everyone in between because they knew as citizens, they could demand more, that they could vote for what they believe matters, and that they didn't need to be constrained by a party or political affiliation.

This is happening across the country. New Jersey elected Mikie Sherrill as governor in a double-digit victory. [Applause] Democrats flipped state legislative seats in places like Georgia, Iowa, Mississippi and Texas. The list goes on and on. Ordinary Americans are stepping up to run in the spirit of our forefathers.

They are running to demand more and to do more for their neighbors and communities. I know the story well. I first ran for office in 2018 alongside dozens of other Democrats who did the seemingly impossible, flipping 41 seats in Congress. In my case, I was the first Democrat elected in 50 years, swinging our district 17 points.

Those who are stepping up now to run will win in November because Americans, you at home, know you can demand more and that we are working to lower costs. We are working to keep our communities and our country safe and we are working for you. [Applause] In his farewell address, George Washington warned us about the possibility of, quote, cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men rising to power.

But he also encouraged us, all Americans, to unite in a common cause to move this nation forward. That is our charge once more and that is what we are seeing across the country. It is deeply American and patriotic to do so, and it is how we ensure that the state of our union remains strong, not just this year but for the next 250 years as well, because we the people have the power to make change, the power to stand up for what is right, the power to demand more of our nation.

[Applause] May God bless the Commonwealth of Virginia and may God bless the United States of America. [Applause]

Copyright 2026 NPR

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

An open-air food and art marketplace by the organizers of the popular Smorgasburg LA is coming to East Los Angeles this Saturday. 

Eastside Living will bring shopping, food, music and other activities to East L.A.’s Eugene A. Obregon Park. The free event is part of a collaboration between L.A. County and Smorgasburg LA to highlight more than 30 local “small businesses, makers, chefs, artists, and entrepreneurs who make L.A. County’s neighborhoods what they are.”

Vendors include Mariscos Mar-es, an Eastside-based seafood pop-up; Sus Arepas, which offers Colombian bites from its shop in City Terrace; Stairway to Pizza, a specialty pizza operation based in Boyle Heights; and coffee from UMO Coffee and East L.A.’s Enfermos Cafe. Shoppers can find vintage items from Boyle Heights’ Te Adoro Vintage or Whittier’s Newlin House. Visit  Smorgasburg’s Instagram for the latest list of vendors.

A customer sorts through clothing outside of Boyle Heights’ Te Adoro Vintage in Boyle Heights. The vintage clothing shop will have a space at East LA Living on Nov. 14, 2026.

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For couple Victor and Leticia Rojas, who co-own Mariscos Mar-es, the market will give local vendors a chance to showcase their culinary creations to a wider audience of foodies right in their backyard. 

“We see a lot of events happening in Culver City and the Arts District but not in East L.A. We’re really excited that Smorgasburg is partnering with East L.A. organizers and holding an event over here,” Victor Rojas said.

His wife agreed, adding the need for a community-powered event in their neighborhood after a year of anxiety driven by ICE around the Los Angeles area. 

“A lot of people are scared to go out, so it’s events like this that show the pride of East L.A. and allow people to come together as one to explore the foods and other vendors,” Leticia Rojas said. 

Smorgasburg LA launched in downtown L.A. in 2016 and has since amassed a following of foodies to taste plates from locally based pop-ups. The event hosts thousands of hungry attendees each week and features food and shopping vendors as well as a beer garden. 

Smorgasburg’s SGV Living, a similar event featuring vendors and other small businesses local to the San Gabriel Valley, launches on Nov. 28 in Rowland Heights.  

The Trump administration has made many changes to education policy that are hard to miss: cutting the U.S. Education Department's workforce by roughly half, canceling research funding, uprooting special education staff, upending student civil rights protections, overhauling student loan repayment plans, scaling back graduate school loans — the list goes on.

But the latest change — one President Donald Trump has called his "secret weapon" — has gone largely unnoticed, even as it's set to take effect in July. That's because it's hidden inside one singularly boring word:

Accreditation.

"The time has come to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical left," Trump said in a 2023 campaign video. "Our secret weapon will be the college accreditation system."

Specifically, he pledged to overhaul it — a notably wonky threat from a politician who usually disdains wonkery. Now, the Education Department has kept Trump's promise.

What is accreditation? 

It's the system the U.S. government relies on to determine which colleges and universities are worthy of receiving millions, even billions of dollars in federal student loans and grants.

In practical terms, colleges pay membership dues to third-party, nonprofit accreditors that then review the schools across a range of categories, including curriculum quality, faculty qualifications, physical facilities, the soundness of their finances and so on.

An accreditor's job, essentially, is to make sure college students are getting good value and to prevent shady schools from pocketing taxpayer dollars without delivering quality degrees.

Decades ago, Congress also made clear that accreditors are not part of the government.

"Congress wanted accrediting agencies to be independent of the federal government. It wanted agencies to set standards independent of the federal government," says Antoinette Flores at the Council for Higher Education Accreditation.

Federal law does require that accreditors assess schools in several key areas — such as student achievement, faculty and curriculum — and it gives the Department oversight. But Flores says, the law lets accreditors decide what standards a school must meet to determine its worthiness.

In keeping with Trump's 2023 promise, the department has now overhauled the federal rules for accreditors — changes it says will foster innovation and lower costs. Some higher education experts worry these changes will not only hurt students but also allow the department to further punish schools it doesn't like and even police campus political speech.

"This rule gives [the Education Department] the authority to meddle in the internal affairs of colleges and universities in ways that they never have been able to in the past," warns Bob Shireman, an accreditation expert and former top official in the Obama Education Department.

Changes to what accreditors will measure

While the Education Department cannot legally tell accreditors precisely how to evaluate colleges and universities, it does oversee some key requirements, and these new rules dramatically expand those requirements and the department's authority with them.

Most notably, accreditors must now evaluate school policies on intellectual diversity, "ensuring that students are exposed to a range of viewpoints," according to a department press release.

It's not entirely clear how that requirement will work in practice, but opposition has been loud.

"For the first time," Shireman says, "you will have an avenue for the federal government to go in at least to an accreditor, but through accreditors to colleges, and tell them what balance of points of view the federal government thinks they should have."

The department could then, conceivably, threaten a school's accreditation and, ultimately, its access to federal student aid if it considers them out of balance.

Of this change, PEN America, a nonprofit dedicated to defending free expression, warned that "this is part of a plan to weaken [higher education] and its historic protections for the freedom to think, teach, research and learn."

The Education Department argues it's doing the opposite, calling this "a commonsense step toward restoring intellectual diversity by … creating an environment where differing perspectives can be debated openly and fairly," wrote Ellen Keast, communications director for the under secretary, in a statement to NPR.

"The regulations do not mandate any specific policies," Keast added, "nor do they give the Department any authority to police speech. Instead, they reinforce a fundamental principle: truth emerges through rigorous debate, not enforced consensus."

Nevertheless, even some conservatives have expressed anxiety over this expansion of federal power. Beth Akers, an economist and senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, supports much of the overhaul but says this particular change goes too far.

"[It] does put the administration sort of in a seat of judgment over the institutions, over the accreditors, about whether or not they are appropriately teaching ideology. And that is something I'm uncomfortable with," Akers says.

While the Education Department insists it cannot police political speech on campus, that is what Trump promised in that 2023 video, when he pledged to "fire the radical-left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxists, maniacs and lunatics."

Not all of the changes are controversial. One enjoys some bipartisan support, says Emily Rounds, senior higher education policy adviser at the center-left think tank, Third Way.

That change will push accreditors to give more weight to student outcomes, Rounds says, focusing on questions like, "How much are they going to be earning? What are the licensure pass rates for certain programs? What is the graduation rate? Does an institution retain students year to year or are students dropping out?"

The new accreditation rule changes are set to go into effect ahead of the 2027-28 academic year. Because they were made through the traditional rulemaking process, it will be difficult for Democrats to undo them.

How we got here

Fresh political tension over accreditation began to boil during the Biden administration — between Republican-led states and accreditors they considered too powerful and too liberal.

"The way in which [accreditors] are exerting their authority has really rubbed people the wrong way when it came to these ideological standards they're putting onto institutions," Akers says.

Florida and North Carolina actively clashed with their accreditors over issues including diversity, equity and inclusion and viewpoint diversity on their public university campuses.

"When we said, 'No DEI,' the accreditor was telling our universities, 'Oh no no, you're not gonna get accredited unless you do DEI,'" said Florida's Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, in June 2025. "Who the heck are they to say what our universities have to do?"

DeSantis pushed for the creation of a new accreditor to replace the longstanding accreditor of Florida's public universities, saying he hopes to "upend the monopoly of the woke accreditation cartels."

Five other state university systems — in Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas — have also said they will switch to this new accreditor, the Commission for Public Higher Education.

Making it easier to become an accreditor

Another of the Trump administration's stated goals with its accreditation overhaul is cutting red tape and making it easier for schools and even states to create new accreditors. That, the administration hopes, will lead to more accreditors for schools to choose from.

"The rule promotes greater competition and innovation," the department said in its press release.

Competition, according to the administration, will allow schools to shop around for an accreditor that best fits their needs and lowers costs for schools and students alike. What's more, if a school doesn't like its accreditor, it will be easier to switch mid-stream.

One thing is certain: This will weaken traditional accreditors and strengthen schools.

AEI's Beth Akers argues that's not a bad thing and that this shift will empower schools to innovate and take chances. "We've been teaching students the same way for a very long time. Come sit in a lecture, take a test and then after you've sat there long enough, we give you the credits."

Under the new rules, Akers hopes, schools will be freer to experiment with everything from the value of a credit hour to how much time a student actually needs to spend inside a classroom.

But Bob Shireman, the former Obama administration official, warns that forcing accreditors to compete for the schools they'll be auditing won't increase quality. "One person's red tape is another person's consumer protection: Checking to see if the fire extinguishers have expired is red tape."

Similarly, Shireman worries that making it easier for colleges and universities to jump from one accreditor to another could also weaken student protections.

"If one [accreditor] starts identifying problems, [schools] simply shift their weight over to another accreditor. And so it becomes whack-a-mole in terms of oversight of colleges, and we fail to catch problems soon enough."

Edited by Nirvi Shah
Copyright 2026 NPR

Jensen Huang, CEO of the chipmaking juggernaut Nvidia, is stepping down, the company's board announced Thursday.

The decision comes days after the company took the extraordinary step of launching an investigation following news reports alleging that Huang had had an extramarital affair with one of the company's clients, who U.S. intelligence officials concluded had been recruited by China's top spy agency, according to the New York Times. NPR has not independently confirmed those reports.

In an email to Nvidia staff on Sunday, Huang admitted to cheating on his wife, and said he would cooperate with the investigation.

The company's share price dropped sharply on Wednesday, after the New York Times reported that Huang had had a second affair, this one with an Nvidia executive who reported to him.

Nvidia did not immediately respond to an NPR request for comment.

Huang was widely seen as one of the most important business leaders in the United States. Nvidia dominates the market for the chips used to train and run artificial intelligence. Huang also had President Trump's ear on AI policy, with Trump even calling Huang's phone in September while Huang was onstage during a conference.

The scandal that brought down Huang snowballed quickly over the past two weeks. The New York Times reported in late October that Huang had a close relationship with a Chinese woman at a Singapore-based company that was buying Nvidia chips. Citing unidentified sources, it said U.S. intelligence officials believed she had been recruited by the Chinese government to spy on him and possibly try to influence policy. NPR has not independently confirmed this reporting.

A drip-drip of scoops followed — from the Times and other outlets — suggesting that the relationship was romantic, that senior Trump administration officials knew about the allegations some time ago, and that Huang had had a second affair.

China's foreign ministry has said the allegations of spying are baseless and part of a smear campaign against China.

What's next for Nvidia

Huang's departure launches Nvidia into uncharted territory.

Huang's relationship with the alleged Chinese agent and what the Trump administration knew about it will likely be the subject of an investigation when Democrats take control of Congress in January.

"We should all be extremely concerned about this, and the fact that the White House knew about this for weeks, maybe months now, is is is very disturbing as well," said Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-NY, a senior member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee in an interview with NPR.

The company's Chief Financial Officer, Colette Kress, has been appointed interim CEO. The board said in their statement they would conduct a full search for a new CEO and consider both internal and external candidates.

"There's no obvious replacement," said Stephen Witt, author of a book about Nvidia called The Thinking Machine. "It's not even clear Nvidia can be the same kind of company without Jensen. I have a hard time imagining what Nvidia looks like without Jensen."

Nvidia still plans to report its quarterly earnings on Tuesday.

Huang was one of the longest-serving CEOs in U.S. corporate history, stepping into the role after launching the company with partners over bottomless cups of coffee at a Denny's restaurant in San Jose, Calif., 33 years ago. Nvidia got its start making specialized chips to create 3D graphics for computers that would come to be known as graphics processing units, or GPUs.

He was the face of Nvidia and an unlikely celebrity, giving countless keynote speeches and interviews in his trademark leather jacket, or posing for selfies with adoring fans.

Huang was also the company's driving force. Under his leadership, Nvidia made a big and early bet on artificial intelligence, investing heavily to transform its niche graphics chips into general-purpose processing units that were ideal for the volume of computations required to create AI.

That bet would pay off in spades as GPUs became the go-to chip for AI creators. When AI burst into the public consciousness in late 2022 with the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT — a chatbot trained and run on Nvidia chips — the firm was worth about $400 billion. Today, it's valued at more than $4 trillion, among the most valuable in the world, and it dominates the market for GPUs.

But analysts say despite Huang's visionary management of the business, he had a blind spot for succession and hadn't articulated a clear plan, at least publicly.

In a Bloomberg interview from mid-October, Huang was vague about succession plans. "I'm really hoping that the next CEO of the company is already at the company, but 20 years from now, I hope I stay healthy and I hope I continue to earn my keep."

Huang's adult children, Spencer and Madison Huang, both work at Nvidia. Asked about talk that Madison might be in line to succeed him, he paused, and told Bloomberg: "if that's their aspiration, Spencer or Madison's, they have to go earn it. And it's really, really hard work. It takes a lot of sacrifice."

Daniel Newman, CEO of the Futurum Group, a tech research firm, said the company will inevitably be different without Huang, and its future success is unclear.

"They've always had Jensen as this sort of visionary at the front," he said. "I don't think that's replaceable."

Katie McQue contributed to this story.
Copyright 2026 NPR