EXPLAINED | Who Is Colette Kress, the CFO Now Running Nvidia?

Colette Kress spent more than a decade fielding investors’ questions alongside Jensen Huang. Now she has his job. Nvidia named its longtime chief financial officer interim CEO on 12 November after Huang resigned as president, CEO and director with immediate effect. Kress will keep her finance job while the board looks for a permanent successor. Nvidia also named its first board chair, Harvey C. Jones.

Why did Nvidia put its CFO in charge?

The board picked someone who already knows the business and regularly faces shareholders. Jones said Kress understands Nvidia’s operations, customers and finances. She has been responsible for explaining what the company sells, what it earns and how much it expects to make next. Investors now get to ask the same person how the company plans to deliver those numbers without the co-founder who had led it since 1993.

Who hired her, and what did she do before Nvidia?

Huang announced her appointment as CFO in September 2013. She came from Cisco, where she oversaw financial strategy, planning and business development for its Business Technology and Operations Finance organisation. Before Cisco, she spent 13 years at Microsoft, including four years as CFO of its Server and Tools division. She started in finance at Texas Instruments and holds an MBA from Southern Methodist University. Her career already spanned chips, enterprise software and networking before she joined Nvidia.

How different is Nvidia from the company she joined?

It is more than 50 times larger by annual revenue. Nvidia reported $4.13 billion in the fiscal year Kress joined and $215.9 billion in FY26. Its hiring announcement in 2013 talked about visual computing, mobile and the cloud. Today the business depends heavily on the machines that train and run AI. In the most recent reported quarter, data centres brought in $89 billion of Nvidia’s $96.2 billion in sales. That includes hardware for connecting chips as well as the chips themselves.

What does she already know about the job ahead?

She knows the assumptions behind Nvidia’s forecasts. In August, Nvidia forecast about $108 billion in quarterly revenue and said its outlook assumed no data-centre computing sales to China. That one line tells investors something about how to judge the next set of numbers. If Nvidia changes its forecast, they can ask how much comes from orders, how much from the company’s ability to deliver and whether its assumptions about China have moved.

What can an interim CEO decide?

Kress can run the company while the directors recruit. Nvidia has announced no special restrictions on her powers or timetable for the search. Some of her decisions will have consequences long after the board hires a permanent CEO. How much inventory to secure, which customers get scarce shipments first and which new investments the company approves can shape sales for several quarters. The handover also gives Kress two jobs at once. She is responsible for operating decisions as CEO and for the financial reporting investors use to judge them.

Who is Harvey Jones, and why does he matter?

Jones has been an Nvidia director since its founding year, 1993. He previously ran Synopsys, which makes software engineers use to design chips. He now chairs the board, whose directors will oversee the interim leadership and choose the permanent chief executive. Nvidia says it will look both inside and outside the company. Kress’s appointment settles who runs the company during that search. The board has left the permanent job open.

Why should Nvidia’s customers in India follow the handover?

Companies such as Yotta build computing services around Nvidia hardware. In February, Yotta announced a plan for 20,736 Blackwell Ultra chips and a four-year deal worth over $1 billion for Nvidia’s cloud business to use capacity at the Indian facility. The leadership announcement gave no revised terms for that project. For customers waiting to use the machines, delivery and availability matter more immediately than the name of the next permanent CEO.

What will investors ask Kress on 17 November?

Nvidia says its earnings call will proceed on schedule. The results cover a quarter that ended on 25 October, before Kress became interim CEO. Investors will listen to what she says about future orders, shipments and spending. They can also ask which executives now make the decisions Huang used to make on products and major customer relationships. That is the first scheduled opportunity to hear how Nvidia intends to operate under its new leadership.