Nvidia Hands Interim CEO Role to CFO Colette Kress After Huang Exit

Nvidia named CFO Colette Kress interim CEO on Thursday, hours after co-founder Jensen Huang resigned amid multiple allegations of extramarital affairs — including one involving an alleged Chinese spy and two with company employees. Kress, 59, will run the company and hold the interim CFO job until the board picks a permanent successor.

The board is searching both inside and outside the company. Harvey C Jones, the newly named chair of Nvidia's board, set the tone in a statement Thursday.

"Colette has helped lead Nvidia through a period of extraordinary growth and has a deep understanding of our business, customers, operations and financial position," Jones said. "The board has full confidence in Colette and the leadership team."

Plain takeaway: the board moved within hours to stop a leadership vacuum at the center of the AI economy.

What's at stake in the succession?

Plenty. Nvidia, with a market cap of roughly $4 trillion, engineers the advanced chips that train AI models and power OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. Whoever replaces Huang shapes the direction of the entire artificial intelligence industry.

Huang co-founded the company in 1993 and ran it with an unusual span of control — roughly 60 direct reports gave him outsized influence over daily operations. His son and daughter both work at Nvidia, and his daughter has been seen as his possible proxy, but neither has sufficient experience for the top job, per the reporting.

The turmoil lands just as Nvidia prepares to report third-quarter earnings next Tuesday.

Who is Colette Kress?

Kress joined Nvidia in 2013 as CFO after finance roles at Texas Instruments, Microsoft and Cisco. She has overseen the company's transformation from a niche video-game chip maker into a trillion-dollar AI juggernaut, and she's a regular voice on quarterly earnings calls. She holds an undergraduate degree in finance and an MBA.

In a 2023 interview with an Israeli publication, Kress credited her two young sons with pushing her to join Nvidia in 2013 — they knew its chips from their video games. She became a billionaire in 2025 on the value of her Nvidia equity, and Forbes put her net worth at $1.2 billion in mid-2026, ranking her 32nd among America's richest self-made women. Fortune and Forbes have both placed her among the 50 most powerful women in business in recent years.

People who know her describe Kress as a calming contrast to Huang's often confrontational style, Reuters reported. Not everyone shares that calm assessment — least of all Huang himself.

What did Huang think of her?

The relationship between the two appears to have been strained. During a meeting this past summer, Huang called Kress "a deer in the headlights" and interrupted her presentation, a person familiar with the comments told the Wall Street Journal. In that August meeting, Huang insinuated Kress was not someone who could help him make decisions.

Kress struck a different note in her Thursday memo to employees, praising Huang and pledging to keep "building on the extraordinary foundation Jensen created over the last 33 years." She added that Nvidia's "strength has always come from its people." In short: publicly gracious, whatever the private friction.

Who else could get the job?

The candidate field extends well beyond Kress:

• Ian Buck — at Nvidia since 2004, he manages the company's AI hardware and software products and has led generative AI deployments with Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, OpenAI and others.
• Rene Haas — CEO of UK chipmaker Arm Holdings and a former Nvidia vice president and general manager who spent seven years at the company before joining Arm in 2013.
• Lisa Su — CEO of AMD, Nvidia's most direct and fierce competitor, and a distant cousin of Huang.

Can a finance chief lead a chip powerhouse?

That's the question investors are asking. Many investors, analysts and industry sources who spoke to Reuters questioned whether a finance executive could preserve the technological risk-taking that made Nvidia an AI chips powerhouse.

"Putting [Kress] in the interim role makes sense to keep the markets calm, but I don't think she is the long-term visionary that Nvidia needs to continue its current trajectory," said Anshel Sag, principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy.

There's also a political dimension. Sunny Cheung, an analyst at the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation, said Kress could face congressional questions about Nvidia's oversight of chip sales involving Chinese military-linked institutions and south-east Asian intermediaries.

Nvidia reports Q3 earnings next Tuesday — the first test of whether Kress's steady hand can hold markets calm while the board hunts for a permanent CEO.