Colette Kress Named Interim Nvidia CEO Following Jensen Huang’s Departure
Nvidia has named 59-year-old Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress as interim chief executive officer following the departure of founder Jensen Huang, who led the chipmaker for 33 years, Il Sole 24 ORE reported.
Stepping in after Jensen Huang
Jensen Huang built Nvidia into the central symbol of the artificial intelligence revolution over three decades at the helm. He announced his resignation, leaving the company without the engineer who drove its technological vision and political strategies.
Colette Kress is not an engineer, does not wear leather jackets, and has largely avoided the spotlight during her tenure. She has known the company’s accounts better than anyone else since joining as chief financial officer in September 2013, when annual revenues sat at just over 4 billion dollars.
Revenues surpassed 215 billion dollars in the most recent fiscal year.
Building a career in technology finance
Kress earned a finance degree from the University of Arizona and an MBA from the Southern Methodist University before entering the American technology sector. She spent years at Texas Instruments and logged thirteen years at Microsoft, where she ultimately reached the financial helm of the Server and Tools division, followed by a stint at Cisco.
She accepted the Nvidia post in 2013 partly due to her two sons, who were then eight and ten years old and recognized the company through video games.
Forbes estimated her personal net worth at 1.2 billion dollars in 2026, while Fortune placed her among the fifty most powerful women in the global economy.
Beneath a quiet public profile lies a decisive manager. An internal source cited by the Financial Times described Kress as an executive with sharp elbows who is capable of making difficult choices and pushing back against top corporate leadership.
Kress manages data center funding and investor concerns
Kress blocked a 250 billion dollar transaction last August that would have committed Nvidia to financially back a massive OpenAI data center project in Ohio. Concerned about investor backlash, she reined in the commitment to 105 billion dollars.
She has also managed the intricate financial system through which Nvidia aids customer expansion via investments, guarantees, and credit deals. Critics label this mechanism a form of circular financing where Nvidia props up the very companies buying its chips to generate ongoing product demand. Kress has defended the practice as a necessary tool to accelerate infrastructure development, maintaining a strong relationship with Wall Street.
Her lack of engineering expertise stands in stark contrast to Huang, who concentrated technical strategy and foundational development in his own hands. Potential candidates for the permanent CEO post include Ian Buck, a veteran Nvidia executive and key architect of Cuda, and Rene Haas, chief executive of Arm and a former group executive.
Facing the upcoming quarterly earnings
The first major test for the interim chief executive arrives on Tuesday, November 17, with the presentation of quarterly financial results. Kress must reassure jittery investors regarding both ongoing business growth and the operational stability of a firm built entirely around its departing founder.
Having spent her tenure leaving the stage to Huang, Kress must now prove that Nvidia can move forward without him.