Colette Kress Takes Nvidia's Helm as the Board Hunts Huang's Heir

In September 2013, in her first week as Nvidia's chief financial officer, Colette Kress asked her new boss how long he thought he would want her in the role. Jensen Huang had interviewed 22 candidates before hiring her. She had spent nearly 25 years in finance jobs at technology companies including Cisco and Microsoft, and her young sons, avid gamers, had encouraged her to join what was then a niche maker of graphics processors for video games. Huang did not give her a number. "I said, 'For as long as we shall live and death do us part,'" he recalled on a podcast this year.

On Thursday, Nov. 12, Nvidia's board gave her his job.

Kress, the company's finance chief for 13 years, is now interim chief executive of the world's most valuable chipmaker while its directors search for a permanent successor to Huang, the only person who has ever run it, who resigned after admitting an affair with a suspected Chinese intelligence operative and after reports of a second affair with a subordinate. Her name appears on the lists of possible permanent successors, in a field that reaches from an Nvidia vice president to the chief executives of AMD and Arm.

The finance chief

Kress has been Nvidia's executive vice president and chief financial officer. She holds an undergraduate degree in finance from the University of Arizona and an MBA from Southern Methodist University. She will keep the finance post while she serves as interim chief executive.

Nvidia's sales in 2013 were $4.28 billion. In its most recent fiscal year they reached $215.9 billion, roughly 50 times as much, and the company had moved from video game graphics to the center of the artificial intelligence boom. Kress worked closely with Huang through that change.

Her most public duty was speaking to Wall Street. On quarterly earnings calls she delivered a rosy message as revenue and the share price soared, and among investors she is Nvidia's best-known executive after Huang.

As finance chief she also put numbers on the cost of American limits on chip sales to China. In 2023 she told financial analysts that China accounted for 20 to 25 percent of Nvidia's data center revenue. Beyond the lost sales, she has said, the policies risk strengthening Nvidia's competitors in China. Huang had been the most prominent advocate of looser restrictions, and pressure in Washington for tougher curbs has grown since the scandal broke.

The stock's rise made her wealthy. Kress owned roughly 4.44 million Nvidia shares as of the company's most recent annual report, a stake worth about $772 million.

The handover

Huang's fall took less than a week. On Sunday, Nov. 8, after earlier denials, he admitted in a letter to employees to an extramarital affair with Alice Huang, a Chinese executive suspected of working on behalf of China's Ministry of State Security. On Wednesday came reports of a second affair, with an Nvidia executive who reported to him. The board met late that night and accepted his resignation as president, chief executive and director, effective immediately. Nvidia shares fell 7 percent on Thursday.

Some directors had favored Kress for the interim role before that meeting. The board also debated installing a chief operating officer to serve alongside the interim chief executive. The company's announcement on Thursday did not mention one.

The announcement did create a post Nvidia had never had. Harvey Jones became the first chair of the board in the company's history. Jones joined the board in 1993, while he was chief executive of the chip-design software maker Synopsys. Last year Nvidia bought a $2 billion stake in Synopsys, the company he once led. In an email to employees he did not comment on the circumstances of Huang's exit and called his contributions "profound." He wrote at greater length about Kress.

"As CFO for over 13 years, Colette has been a key architect of NVIDIA's growth and capital strategy," Jones wrote. He added: "The Board has full confidence in Colette to deliver on our commitments to shareholders, customers, partners, and to each of you."

Kress wrote to employees the same day. She said she believes "deeply in this company" and in each of them. She also acknowledged the days that preceded her appointment: "The Board, staff and I recognize that this has been an extraordinarily difficult period and I want you to know how grateful we are for your resilience."

Her public statement, in the company's announcement, pointed back to her predecessor. "NVIDIA's strength has always come from its people, and together with our leadership team, I am committed to building on the extraordinary foundation Jensen created over the last 33 years," she said. None of her statements this week addresses whether she wants the job permanently.

Two dates are already on her calendar. Nvidia will report results for the third quarter of its fiscal 2027 on Tuesday, Nov. 17, as previously scheduled, with an earnings call at 2 p.m. Pacific time. That day she will present the quarter's results as both finance chief and interim chief executive, days after the shares fell 7 percent on the day Huang resigned. On Wednesday, Nov. 18, Kress is due to address employees directly for the first time as interim chief executive.

No second in command

Huang ran Nvidia with more than 50 direct reports. The company has no chief operating officer, and Huang held the president's title himself. Nvidia never publicly signaled a succession plan for him. The word "succession" appears nowhere in its most recent annual report, against 25 appearances for Microsoft and 16 for Alphabet.

The directors choosing his replacement have served almost 15 years on average, nearly twice as long as the average S&P 500 director. An annual assessment by the executive recruiting firm James Drury Partners, which ranks the governance of companies in the S&P 500 and Fortune 500, placed Nvidia's board 609th out of more than 650 companies.

Jill Fisch, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Carey Law School, assessed that board on Nov. 9, three days before Huang resigned. "The board composition suggests this is... a CEO exercising effective control over the board instead of vice versa," she said. Long tenure, she added, can reduce directors' independence and breed complacency. She also named the difficulty any board faces with a chief executive regarded as an industry visionary: "How do you say no to someone with this track record of success?"

That board has hired an outside search firm and says it will consider internal and external candidates. The board has already promoted Kress on an interim basis, and her appointment follows a familiar pattern. Boards often turn to finance chiefs for near-term stabilization, though they are generally seen as a stopgap and not a long-term choice, especially at technology companies.

Huang spent more than three decades combining deep technical expertise with operational skill in an unusually hands-on role shaping Nvidia's strategy. Kress's career, before Nvidia and inside it, has been in finance. Jones made the board's case for her in Thursday's announcement, saying she "has a deep understanding of our business, customers, operations and financial position" and is supported by an experienced leadership team.

The field

The names in circulation come from people familiar with the search and from outside rundowns of likely candidates; none of the executives has said publicly that they want the job, and Nvidia has not named its search firm.

Ian Buck, Nvidia

Inside Nvidia, the other name is Ian Buck, the vice president who runs its data center products, including the AI chips. Buck is a familiar face to customers and the inventor of CUDA, the software framework that helps make Nvidia's chips useful for AI. He lacks the operational experience investors often look for in the head of a large public company.

Rene Haas, Arm

Rene Haas, chief executive of Arm Holdings, is a former Nvidia executive whose chip design business has a close partnership with his old employer. In 2020 Nvidia tried to buy Arm from SoftBank, and the deal failed under antitrust scrutiny.

Lisa Su, AMD

Lisa Su, chief executive of Advanced Micro Devices and Huang's cousin, leads Nvidia's closest competitor in technology and customers. During her tenure AMD overtook Intel in technological leadership and its stock rose nearly 170-fold. AMD remains a fraction of Nvidia's size, and its AI chips are a long way from matching Nvidia's adoption. Su and Broadcom's chief executive, Hock Tan, are the kind of seasoned chip-company chiefs likely to appear on a short list of outsiders.

Johny Srouji, Apple

Johny Srouji, Apple's chief hardware officer, is being considered, according to a person familiar with the matter. He has led the in-house silicon program behind the custom chips in the iPhone and Mac, and he was among the executives considered for the top job at Intel in 2019. Last year he was reportedly "seriously considering" leaving Apple before deciding to stay. Much of his experience was built inside Apple, and he has not been tested in the kind of high-profile salesmanship Huang is known for.

Matt Garman, Amazon Web Services

Matt Garman, who runs Amazon Web Services, oversees a business that rents out computing power from a vast network of data centers, including on Amazon's in-house chips. Like Huang, he blends technical and operational expertise. The knock against him is that Amazon was seen as initially lagging Microsoft and Google in building AI infrastructure.

Amin Vahdat, Google

Amin Vahdat oversees Google's tensor processing unit program, a rival to Nvidia's AI chips. His technical credentials are formidable, and he has less experience running a public company of Nvidia's scale.

Sanjay Mehrotra, Micron

Sanjay Mehrotra, chief executive of Micron Technology, has steered a chipmaker through boom-and-bust cycles and presided over a gain of more than 2,700 percent in its shares during his tenure, helped by AI-driven demand for memory. His background is largely in memory and manufacturing, rather than in graphics processor architecture and software.

Tim Cook, Apple

One name came from the White House. President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social on Thursday that "there is only one man to take his place, TIM COOK of Apple. A Legend replaces a Legend!" Cook is Apple's executive chairman, having handed the chief executive job to John Ternus, and his duties in that role include dealing with world leaders such as Trump.

The Huang family

Three members of Huang's family work at Nvidia: his children, Spencer and Madison, and his son-in-law, Nico Caprez, who holds the most prominent role of the three as vice president of global AI infrastructure growth. Huang has said he does not wish the burden of running Nvidia on his children and that they "have to go earn it."

The search

Nvidia's announcement gave no timetable for the search. Jason Schloetzer, a Georgetown University professor who co-authors the Conference Board's annual report on CEO succession, described on Nov. 9, while Huang was still chief executive, what an inside choice would cost a company where so many executives reported directly to the top. Replace Huang with an insider, he said, and "you're going to have 59 people who will all think 'it should have been me.'"

"A horse race with 60 horses has no good solution," Schloetzer said.

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Marcus Schuler

San Francisco

Editor-in-Chief and founder of Implicator.ai. Former ARD correspondent and senior broadcast journalist with 10+ years covering tech. Writes daily briefings on policy and market developments. Based in San Francisco. E-mail: editor@implicator.ai