Who is Collette Kress, NVIDIA's interim CEO?

• Big Tech

Kress spent 25 years in various finance roles before joining NVIDIA in 2013

After 33 years as the chief executive officer of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang has resigned from the AI and gaming giant he founded. On Thursday morning, the company's board of director announced Colette Kress, NVIDIA's current executive vice president and chief financial officer, as Huang's temporary replacement.

"The Board has full confidence in Colette and the leadership team, and we expect the company's operations, customer commitments and product roadmap to continue without interruption," newly-minted NVIDIA board chair Harvey Jones said in a release announcing Thursday's news.

Kress is a relative unknown, but is taking lead of NVIDIA at tumultuous time in the company's history. Huang departure comes days after NVIDIA's board said it would investigate Huang after he admitted to having an affair with a former tech executive accused of being a Chinese intelligence asset. The New York Times later reported that Huang had also had an affair with an NVIDIA executive who reported to him. Before the revelations, the company did not have a succession plan in place. And for at least the immediate future, it's now on Kress to lead the company. Here's what we know about the executive.

Who is Kress?

Kress worked at three companies before joining NVIDIA. She first spent eight years in finance roles at Texas Instruments before joining Microsoft in 1997. In 2006, six years after Steve Ballmer took over as Microsoft's CEO, she became the chief financial officer of the company's Server and Tools division. She remained with the company until 2010, when she moved to Cisco. There, she was the senior vice president and chief financial officer of the company's Business Technology and Operations Finance unit.

To hear Kress tell it, Huang went out of his way to recruit her. Sometime before she joined NVIDIA in 2013, the CEO apparently sketched his vision for the company on a whiteboard. Per a 2023 interview, Huang wanted to transform NVIDIA into the dominant player in the nascent AI industry. Say what you will about Huang's personal life and judgement, the man was an AI visionary.

It would be almost another four years following Kress joining NVIDIA before a group of Google researchers published "Attention Is All You Need," the paper that introduced the world to transformer models, and nearly a decade before the release of ChatGPT. Kress partly credits her sons, who were only eight and 10 at the time, for buying Huang's pitch. Despite their young age, the two already knew of NVIDIA and its importance to gaming. In a 2024 Fortune interview, Kress said NVIDIA was the smallest company she had worked for when she joined in 2013.

At the start of her tenure, NVIDIA's revenue was $4.28 billion for the year. In fiscal 2026, the company recorded a record $215.9 billion in revenue.

What comes next?

When NVIDIA's board of directors announced Kress as Huang's temporary successor, it said it would consider both internal and external candidates to take on the role of CEO permanently, leaving the door open for her and other current NVIDIA employees to win the job. In any case, it's far too early to speculate who the company's board might interview for the job. But if you can forgive a writer a tired analogy, if Kress stays on as CEO, she is likely to be a Tim Cook-like figure, one that can stabilize the company and guide it toward continued growth.

"The Board, [executive 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, professionalism and continued dedication," Kress wrote in her first email to NVIDIA employees after the transition was announced, according to CNBC.

Still, she has a very difficult job ahead of her. Huang has agreed to testify before Congress in a hearing that the House aims to hold before the Thanksgiving holiday. The chair of the House Foreign Affairs committee, Brian Mast of Florida, said he wasn't ruling out the possibility of "public hearings for other people or other things down road." You can bet NVIDIA is likely to face an intense amount of scrutiny in the coming weeks, particularly when Democrats take control of the House and Senate at the start of next year.