Meet Colette Kress, Nvidia’s New Interim CEO

Save Story Save this story Save Story Save this story Nvidia’s CEO and cofounder Jensen Huang is officially out , and longtime chief financial officer Colette Kress is in. The chipmaker’s board of directors announced Thursday that Kress, who joined Nvidia in 2013, has been named interim CEO following Huang’s resignation amid a scandal over his extramarital affair with a Chinese businesswoman believed by US officials to be an asset of China’s Ministry of State Security. Harvey Jones, the newly appointed chair of Nvidia’s board, 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.” He added that Kress will be supported by an “experienced leadership team” and that the board has “full confidence” in her. Kress was among the most obvious candidates to fill the void after Huang’s departure, according to multiple tech executives and industry analysts who follow Nvidia closely, given her long tenure at the company, credibility on Wall Street and across the tech industry, and, perhaps most importantly, her deep familiarity with Nvidia’s business and finances. “She’s extremely strong-willed, professional, and whip smart. She doesn’t tolerate nonsense. She can be friendly and gracious, too,” says a former Nvidia executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “She obviously has a keen sense for how Jensen thinks.” “Colette is the logical choice,” says Patrick Moorhead, founder and chief analyst at Moor Insights & Strategies, who has tracked the chip industry for decades. “She has credibility with investors because she answers hard questions directly.” Moorhead says Kress has operated as much more than a “numbers” CFO. “In my conversations with her, she goes deep on the product roadmap, from rack-scale systems to networking and software,” he says. Got a Tip? Do you know something about Jensen Huang and what’s going on inside Nvidia right now? We'd like to hear from you. Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact the reporters securely on Signal at ChaoticGoode.12 and louise_matsakis.83 Nvidia’s board said on Sunday it was launching an independent investigation into Huang’s activities following a report by The New York Times that he had an affair with a woman named Alice Huang, who US officials suspected of being a Chinese spy. WIRED reported on Monday that Huang quietly hired a crisis communications firm sometime last year to handle matters related to his personal life. By October of that year, the firm was being looped in on all press inquiries involving Huang at Nvidia, around the same time The New York Times reported that US authorities were investigating whether a company linked to Alice Huang had helped Chinese firms evade US chip export controls. While Huang has long been the public face of Nvidia, Kress has been responsible for managing the chipmaker’s relationship with Wall Street. On earnings calls, she often details Nvidia’s financial performance, customer demand, supply constraints, and other key 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,” Kress told the Israeli business newspaper Globes in 2023. Before joining Nvidia, Kress spent more than two decades in finance roles at Microsoft, Cisco, and Texas Instruments. Huang personally recruited her in 2013, when Nvidia was still best known for its gaming graphics cards, according to Globes. Huang laid out his vision for the company’s future on a whiteboard, explaining how Nvidia could become a major supplier of computing infrastructure for artificial intelligence. Other potential successors to Huang included Ian Buck, a more than 20-year Nvidia veteran who created the company’s software platform CUDA and now oversees its high-performance computing business, and Jeff Fisher, who joined Nvidia in 1994 as the head of software sales and later became senior vice president of its GeForce unit, where he led Nvidia’s strategy for bringing GPUs to market. However, Nvidia’s unusual corporate structure has long meant that dozens of executives report directly to Huang. The company lacks a traditional chief operating officer. Even executive vice presidents aren’t necessarily given direct control over budgets, sources have told WIRED. As a result, few people within the organization have the same level of understanding of the company’s financials as Kress. The former Nvidia executive who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity said that while Kress is incredibly sharp and “can step into the [CEO] role immediately without needing any guidance,” Kress doesn’t have the same engineering and technical expertise that Huang brought to his role as a founding CEO. She has also shied away from being “at the center of public attention,” this person said. Given the intense scrutiny surrounding Huang lately, this leadership style might be a welcome temporary change for Nvidia.