Colette Kress: The Pragmatist Now Running Nvidia After Jensen Huang's Sudden Exit

For more than a decade, Colette Kress was the executive in the room willing to tell Jensen Huang no. As Nvidia's chief financial officer, she pushed back while the co-founder drove the chipmaker deeper into multibillion-dollar artificial intelligence bets, questioning deals that others inside the company were happy to wave through. Now, after Huang's sudden resignation on November 12, the 59-year-old finance chief has been handed the top job herself — on an interim basis, while Nvidia's board searches for a permanent successor.

It is the first leadership transition in Nvidia's history. Huang co-founded the company and ran it for three decades, turning a graphics-chip maker into the most valuable company at the centre of the global AI boom. His departure, in a cloud of scandal, leaves Kress to steady a business that is suddenly without the architect of its rise — and to answer questions about how much she knew, and when.

The executive who checked Huang's ambitions

People familiar with the matter told Reuters that Kress spent years acting as an important counterweight to Huang, whose extraordinary success had given him wide latitude on key decisions. As he pushed Nvidia into ever-larger AI investments, she pushed back. Her staff clashed with Huang and the company's sales team over the massive and risky financing deals that fed into what some Wall Street critics have called a circular AI economy — including investments in OpenAI and AI infrastructure companies such as Lambda.

The clearest example was a proposed 250 billion dollar plan to support an OpenAI data centre project in Ohio. That arrangement was ultimately pared back to 120 billion dollars, according to Reuters. Huang had also pushed Nvidia to offer financing to startups, and one venture capital investor told Reuters: "I think it's unlikely anyone but Jensen is going to invest in his own customers as aggressively."

The tension between the two was not only about numbers. The Wall Street Journal reported a tense meeting this summer in which Huang called Kress a "deer in the headlights" after she questioned some of his financial deals with AI companies. Months before the scandal broke, some on Wall Street were already asking whether Huang's appetite for risk was sound, and whether the deals he struck were feeding an increasingly circular AI economy.

Kress the pragmatist

Those who know Kress describe her as a calming contrast to Huang's often confrontational style. "Colette is a pragmatist," one person familiar with the matter told Reuters, adding that she can project calm and help stabilise markets while the search for a permanent chief executive goes on. She has already been on calls to reassure customers and suppliers as the turmoil inside the company unfolded.

Kress joined Nvidia in September 2013 after nearly 25 years in finance roles at Microsoft, Cisco and Texas Instruments. In a 2023 interview, she credited her two young sons with urging her to join Nvidia, because they knew its chips from their video games. She holds an undergraduate degree in finance and an MBA, and has been named among the 50 most powerful women in business on rankings compiled by Fortune and Forbes. She became a billionaire in 2025 on the value of her Nvidia equity, according to media reports, and Forbes put her net worth at 1.2 billion dollars in mid-2026, ranking her 32nd on its list of America's richest self-made women.

Her approach to Washington may also differ from her predecessor's. Under her leadership, Nvidia is likely to "approach DC more like other tech companies do, by trying to build capital and make friends," instead of picking "a fight over export controls" the way it did under Huang, one person familiar with the matter told Reuters. That matters, because export controls on advanced AI chips sold to China sit at the heart of the scandal that ended Huang's tenure. For the full timeline of that scandal, see our earlier report: Nvidia's Jensen Huang China chip spy scandal timeline explained.

The doubts about a finance chief in the top job

Not everyone is convinced that a finance executive can keep Nvidia on its current trajectory. Many investors, analysts and industry sources who spoke to Reuters questioned whether Kress could preserve the technological risk-taking that turned Nvidia into 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.

The market's first verdict was harsh. Nvidia shares slumped 14 per cent to their lowest in nearly 16 months on Thursday after the company said Huang would step down, before paring losses to close down 4.3 per cent. Whether Kress will keep the chief executive role permanently is yet to be decided.

Who could follow Huang?

No official shortlist has been announced, and Nvidia's board has said it will consider internal and external candidates, with no timeline given. But several names have surfaced in reporting and market speculation.

The leading internal candidate is Ian Buck, the Nvidia executive who helped launch AI on the company's chips and led development of the CUDA software system that keeps developers tied to Nvidia hardware. Buck, who joined Nvidia in 2004, now serves as vice president of hyperscale and high-performance computing. Prediction markets have put him narrowly ahead of Kress in the race for the permanent job, according to Barron's, citing Polymarket data.

Outside the company, analysts have floated AMD chief executive Lisa Su and Arm boss Rene Haas, who spent seven years at Nvidia earlier in his career. US President Donald Trump offered his own pick on social media, suggesting Apple chief executive Tim Cook should take the job — a suggestion, not a decision, which we covered here: Trump says Tim Cook should be Nvidia's next CEO.

Questions Kress will have to answer

Kress's interim tenure begins under scrutiny. Questions are swirling about how much she knew about Nvidia's chip sales and Huang's affairs. One source told Reuters that Kress knew about his relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice president of healthcare, who reported to him. China has denied the spying allegations, and Reuters said it was not able to contact Alice Huang for comment.

Sunny Cheung, an analyst at the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation, said Kress could face congressional questions about the company's oversight of chip sales involving Chinese military-linked institutions and Southeast Asian intermediaries. Nvidia announced Huang's resignation in a company filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which also confirmed that Kress would serve as interim chief executive while keeping her finance role. For details of that announcement, see: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigns, Colette Kress named interim CEO.

Her first public test comes soon. Nvidia reports third-quarter results on November 17, and investors will be listening closely to the woman who spent years questioning Huang's bets — now responsible for defending them.

Sources

• Reuters, "Colette Kress, the CFO who challenged Huang's bets, is Nvidia's interim CEO" (November 13, 2026), via AsiaOne — https://www.asiaone.com/money/colette-kress-cfo-who-challenged-huangs-bets-nvidias-interim-ceo
• South China Morning Post, "Nvidia's hunt for Jensen Huang's successor: insiders, rivals and a Trump pick" — https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3374268/nvidias-hunt-jensen-huangs-successor-insiders-rivals-and-trump-pick
• The Indian Express, "Who Could Replace Jensen Huang as Nvidia CEO?" — https://indianexpress.com/article/world/us-news/who-will-replace-jensen-huang-nvidia-ceo-candidates-colette-kress-ian-buck-10961529/
• Barron's, "Jensen Huang Is Out at Nvidia. Who Could Replace Him?" — https://www.barrons.com/articles/nvidia-jensen-huang-ceo-successor-colette-kress-a53b45fd
• New York Post, "Nvidia's Jensen Huang had clashed with interim CEO Colette Kress: 'Deer in the headlights'" — https://nypost.com/2026/11/13/business/nvidias-jensen-huang-had-clashed-with-interim-ceo-colette-kress-deer-in-the-headlights/