Nvidia’s board of directors announced Thursday that chief financial officer Colette Kress has been named interim CEO, following the resignation of cofounder and CEO Jensen Huang. Kress joined Nvidia in 2013 and has served as the company’s finance chief. Harvey Jones, the newly appointed chair of Nvidia’s board, said Kress has helped lead Nvidia through a period of extraordinary growth and has a deep understanding of the business, customers, operations and financial position. He said the board has full confidence in her and that she will be supported by an experienced leadership team.
Huang’s departure comes amid a scandal over his extramarital affair with a Chinese businesswoman believed by US officials to be an asset of China’s Ministry of State Security. Nvidia’s board said Sunday it was launching an independent investigation into Huang’s activities following a report by The New York Times on the affair with a woman named Alice Huang. WIRED reported Monday that Huang quietly hired a crisis communications firm sometime last year to handle matters related to his personal life, and that by October of that year the firm was being looped in on all press inquiries involving Huang at Nvidia.
Kress was among the most obvious candidates to fill the void after Huang’s departure, according to multiple tech executives and industry analysts who follow Nvidia closely, given her long tenure, her credibility on Wall Street and across the tech industry, and her deep familiarity with Nvidia’s business and finances. A former Nvidia executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity described her as extremely strong-willed, professional and whip smart, and said she has a keen sense for how Jensen thinks. Patrick Moorhead, founder and chief analyst at Moor Insights & Strategies, called her the logical choice and said she has credibility with investors because she answers hard questions directly.
Moorhead said Kress has operated as much more than a numbers CFO, going deep on the product roadmap in conversations with him, from rack-scale systems to networking and software. While Huang has long been the public face of Nvidia, Kress has been responsible for managing the chipmaker’s relationship with Wall Street, often detailing financial performance, customer demand, supply constraints and other key metrics on earnings calls. Before joining Nvidia, she spent more than two decades in finance roles at Microsoft, Cisco and Texas Instruments. Huang personally recruited her in 2013, when Nvidia was still best known for its gaming graphics cards, laying out his vision for the company’s future on a whiteboard.
Other potential successors to Huang included Ian Buck, a more than 20-year Nvidia veteran who created the company’s CUDA software platform and now oversees its high-performance computing business, and Jeff Fisher, who joined Nvidia in 1994 as head of software sales and later became senior vice president of its GeForce unit. Nvidia’s unusual corporate structure has long meant that dozens of executives report directly to Huang, and the company lacks a traditional chief operating officer. The former Nvidia executive said Kress can step into the CEO role immediately without needing any guidance, but does not have the same engineering and technical expertise Huang brought to the role, and has shied away from being at the center of public attention.
More company and startup news from TechManNews.
