Meet Colette Kress, Nvidia’s New Interim CEO

Nvidia’s board of directors said Thursday that chief financial officer Colette Kress has been named interim chief executive, replacing cofounder Jensen Huang, who resigned. Huang’s departure follows an extramarital affair with a Chinese businesswoman, Alice Huang, whom US officials believe is an asset of China’s Ministry of State Security. The board announced Sunday that it was opening an independent investigation into Huang’s activities, after a New York Times report on the relationship.

Newly appointed board chair Harvey Jones said in a statement that Kress “has helped lead Nvidia through a period of extraordinary growth and has a deep understanding of our business, customers, operations and financial position.” Jones added that Kress will have an “experienced leadership team” behind her and that the board has “full confidence” in her. Kress joined Nvidia in 2013, recruited personally by Huang, who at the time was pitching her on a whiteboard vision of Nvidia as a major supplier of computing infrastructure for artificial intelligence; the company was then best known for gaming graphics cards.

Kress arrived with more than two decades of finance roles at Microsoft, Cisco, and Texas Instruments. Since joining, she has owned Nvidia’s relationship with Wall Street, walking earnings-call audiences through financial performance, customer demand, supply constraints, and other metrics. “One of the things we don’t focus on is the stock price. We focus on our investors and how we would like to innovate,” she told the Israeli business newspaper Globes in 2023.

Analysts and former colleagues cast her as more than a numbers executive. Patrick Moorhead, founder and chief analyst at Moor Insights & Strategies, called her “the logical choice,” citing her credibility with investors for answering hard questions directly, and said she goes deep on product roadmaps spanning rack-scale systems, networking, and software. A former Nvidia executive, speaking anonymously, described her as strong-willed and whip smart, adding that “she obviously has a keen sense for how Jensen thinks.”

The scandal had been building for months. WIRED reported that Huang quietly retained a crisis communications firm sometime last year to handle his personal-life matters, and that by October the firm was looped in on all press inquiries involving him at Nvidia — around the time the Times reported US authorities were investigating whether a company linked to Alice Huang had helped Chinese firms evade US chip export controls.

Other internal names circulated as possible successors included Ian Buck, a 20-year-plus Nvidia veteran who created CUDA and now runs high-performance computing, and Jeff Fisher, who joined in 1994 and led the GeForce unit’s GPU-to-market strategy. What remains open: how long “interim” lasts, whether the board’s investigation produces further leadership action, and how Kress balances investor relations with the roadmap depth Nvidia’s AI customers expect.