Who is Colette Kress? 13 years at Nvidia, now its stand-in boss

Colette Kress is a career finance executive who joined Nvidia in September 2013 as chief financial officer and executive vice president. She will keep the CFO title while she serves as interim CEO, so for now one person holds both jobs.

Before Nvidia, she spent more than two decades in corporate finance at three of the best-known names in American tech:

• Texas Instruments: a series of finance roles early in her career.
• Microsoft: 13 years, including four as CFO of the division that sold server and developer software.
• Cisco: three years as senior vice president and CFO of a business operations finance group.

She studied finance at the University of Arizona and earned an MBA from Southern Methodist University. She is 59, lives in California and keeps a very low profile online.

Kress didn’t arrive at an AI giant. In 2013, Nvidia was still mostly known for graphics cards for video games. Huang recruited her himself and used a whiteboard to lay out how Nvidia could become a key supplier of computing power for artificial intelligence.

That bet paid off on a scale few predicted. Nvidia’s revenue reached $96.22 billion in its second quarter, and she has been the company’s main link to Wall Street through that climb. On earnings calls she walks analysts through demand, supply limits and the figures behind them, which is why she is already a familiar voice to the people who follow the company most closely.

Industry watchers say she is more than a spreadsheet CFO. Patrick Moorhead, founder of the analyst firm Moor Insights & Strategies, called her “the logical choice” and said she gets into detail on the product plan, from full server racks to networking and software.

Nvidia never built a clear line of succession. Huang ran an unusually flat company with as many as 60 people reporting directly to him, and it has no traditional chief operating officer. Even senior executives don’t necessarily control their own budgets.

The result is that very few people inside Nvidia see the whole business the way the finance chief does. Other names floated as possible successors include Ian Buck, the longtime Nvidia engineer behind its CUDA software platform who now runs its high-performance computing business, and Jeff Fisher, who joined in 1994 and later led the GeForce gaming unit.

As for why the seat opened at all: Huang stepped down days after the board launched an independent investigation into his conduct and possible national-security concerns linked to it. The board’s announcement praised his contributions and did not include a statement from him.

Interim means temporary. Kress runs the company until the board picks a permanent leader, and the board says it will consider both people already inside Nvidia and outsiders. There’s no deadline yet.

The board also made a structural change on the same day. Harvey C. Jones, a semiconductor veteran who has sat on Nvidia’s board since the company was founded and previously led chip design software maker Synopsys, becomes its first-ever chair. That gives the board a leader of its own, separate from the CEO, while the search runs.

Jones said the board has full confidence in Kress and her team, and that it expects operations, customer commitments and the product roadmap to carry on without a break.

For people who buy graphics cards or use AI apps, nothing changes overnight. The board’s message is that existing product plans continue, and Kress said her focus stays on customers, partners, developers and shareholders.

For businesses, the picture is more mixed. Some resellers have said a few corporate customers feel uneasy about the security questions, and at least one cautious buyer has paused a purchase until the investigation is settled. Nvidia also sits at the center of a web of AI deals: it reported $99 billion in investments plus another $25 billion in commitments at the end of its second quarter, money that helps fund the cloud companies and AI labs that buy its chips.

For investors, the reaction was sharp. Nvidia shares fell nearly 12% in early trading on Thursday and had dropped as much as 19% since the previous Friday, a loss of more than $855 billion in market value. Partner stocks moved too, with CoreWeave down about 9% and Nebius about 16%. None of that tells you where the stock goes next, and it isn’t a reason to buy or sell on its own.

Nvidia is scheduled to report quarterly earnings on Tuesday, and Kress will be the one answering questions. That call is likely to be the first time analysts hear her plans as the company’s leader, not just its finance chief.

The open questions going in: whether any customers are delaying orders, how the leadership change affects Nvidia’s huge investments in AI partners, and China, which brought in about $7.9 billion, roughly 8% of revenue, in the second quarter. A former colleague described her as sharp enough to step in without guidance, but without Huang’s engineering background and less comfortable in the spotlight. After weeks of headlines about Huang, a quieter leader may suit the moment.