Company’s longtime finance chief spent years at Microsoft and Cisco before joining the AI-chips juggernaut
By Chelsey Dulaney and Robbie Whela
Colette Kress, who was named interim chief executive of Nvidia NVDA -4.34%decrease; down pointing triangle on Thursday, is a longtime lieutenant of departing CEO Jensen Huang and oversaw the chipmaker’s finances during its climb to becoming one of the world’s most valuable companies.
A veteran of the tech industry, Kress joined Nvidia in 2013 after holding finance roles at Cisco, Microsoft and Texas Instruments. Kress has overseen the aggressive expansion of Nvidia’s balance sheet, which the company has used to provide financial backstops for customers in exchange for buying its artificial-intelligence chips.
Kress praised Huang on Thursday, saying in a statement that she will continue “building on the extraordinary foundation Jensen created over the last 33 years.”
In a note to staff, Kress thanked them for their dedication throughout an “extraordinarily difficult period” leading up to Huang’s resignation on Thursday.
“We play a vital role in building the technology that is powering the AI revolution, and we have important work ahead of us,” she said.
Kress will take over a company that has been badly shaken by the scandal surrounding Huang. Nvidia has shed more than $600 billion in market value this week. Huang’s departure—after two extramarital affairs, including one with a suspected Chinese spy and another with an employee—is likely to leave lingering scrutiny of both Nvidia’s dealings with China and its huge balance sheet.
Nvidia has used its massive reservoir of cash to bankroll the broader AI industry, a practice Kress has defended. Critics have argued Nvidia’s efforts to prop up demand across the industry has left it more vulnerable to a downturn, but Kress has characterized the deals as savvy investments.
“We recognize the scale of this support, and we know some will call this circular financing. We see it differently,” she said in August. “The equity returns on our invested capital will be excellent.”
But she has also at times been receptive to investors’ concerns, pumping the brakes in August on a landmark agreement to help OpenAI secure a data-center project after a negative market reaction, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Kress joined Nvidia at the urging of her two sons, according to a 2023 interview she gave to an Israeli newspaper. At the time, Nvidia was working to broaden beyond its traditional market of PC gaming into new business lines such as chips for cars.
“The best thing I could tell any type of CFO coming in: Be careful how much time you spend thinking about the trends that you’ve seen in the past and have a good understanding of how quickly things could move going forward,” she told the Journal in 2016.
Kress said she was drawn to Nvidia because of Huang, whom she described as a visionary, and a culture she described as “essentially ego-less.”
“We’re rather a flat organization,” she said in 2018. “We actually don’t have org charts. We kind of know who works for who.”
Nvidia’s corporate governance has come under scrutiny this week as scandal engulfed the company. Nvidia had no succession plan in place for Huang, and its board had no chair before Thursday, when it named longtime director Harvey C. Jones to that role.
“The Board has full confidence in Colette to deliver on our commitments to shareholders, customers, partners, and to each of you,” Jones said in a note to staff.
The board is starting a search for the company’s next CEO and will consider internal and external candidates, the company said Thursday
Kress also said she was struck by how Nvidia’s leaders remained haunted by the money worries that plagued the company in its early years.
“I would hear stories after stories of the days that they almost ran out of money, and we didn’t have enough to pay this and pay that and I started to look and maybe got a little bit worried,” she said.
But it was Nvidia’s bet on AI that turned the company into a global behemoth. It also turned Kress into one of America’s wealthiest self-made women, ranked higher than Beyoncé in Forbes’s latest list from June. Nvidia’s recent stock slide has crimped her net worth, though Kress’s holdings of Nvidia shares were still worth more than $800 million as of Wednesday’s close. She received $14.3 million in total compensation in Nvidia’s last fiscal year, according to company filings.
Kress graduated from the University of Arizona and received an M.B.A. from Southern Methodist University in 1996, according to her LinkedIn page. She married David Kress, a former Microsoft executive who got his start in the company’s mailroom. They have two sons.
