By Max A. Cherney, Deepa Seetharaman, Alexandra Alper and Krystal Hu
WASHINGTON/SAN FRANCISCO, Nov 12 (Reuters) - Colette Kress spent years as the one Nvidia executive willing to check CEO Jensen Huang’s
enormous, often risky ambitions. As he drove the chipmaker deeper into multibillion-dollar AI investments, she pushed back, according to two people familiar with the matter on Thursday.
Now the 59-year-old finance chief has been handed the top job on an interim basis, while Nvidia searches for a permanent successor. Huang on Thursday stepped downfrom the company he co-founded and ran for three decades in a cloud of scandal, leaving Nvidia to navigate its first leadership transition without the architect of its rise.
Through their conflicts, Kress served as an important counterweight to Huang, whose success afforded him great latitude on key decisions, the two sources said. Months before news that Huang had a relationship with a woman suspected of being a Chinese spy, some on Wall Street were questioning whether his appetite for risk was sound and if the deals he struck were feeding an increasingly circular AI economy.
Kress and 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 deemed a circular AI economy, including investments in OpenAI and AI infrastructure companies such as Lambda, according to one of the people familiar with the matter.
A proposed $250 billion plan to support an OpenAI data center project in Ohio was ultimately pared to $120 billion.
"I think it's unlikely anyone but Jensen is going to invest in his own customers as aggressively," said a third source, a venture capital investor. Huang has pushed Nvidia to offer financing to startups, the person said.
KRESS THE PRAGMATIST
People who know her describe Kress as a calming contrast to Huang’s often confrontational style. Kress joined Nvidia in 2013 after a long career at other tech industry giants including Microsoft, Cisco and Texas Instruments.
"Colette is a pragmatist," said a fourth source familiar with the matter. She can project calm and help stabilize markets while the search is ongoing, the person said, adding that Kress had been on recent calls to reassure customers and suppliers as the tumult inside the company unfolded.
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's leadership, the person said.
But many investors, analysts and industry sources who spoke to Reuters questioned whether a finance executive 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.
Nvidia shares slumped 14% to their lowest in nearly 16 months on Thursday after the company said Huang would step down, but pared losses to close down 4.3%.
Whether Kress will keep the CEO role permanently is yet to be decided. But other names have surfaced, including Nvidia executive Ian Buck, who helped launch AI on Nvidia chips and led development of the CUDA software system. AMD CEO Lisa Su as well as Arm boss Rene Haas have also been speculated as potential candidates.
WHAT DID KRESS KNOW?
Questions are also swirling about how much Kress knew about Nvidia's chip sales and Huang's affairs. China has denied the spying allegations. Reuters was not able to contact Alice Huang for comment.
A fifth source said Kress knew about his relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice president of healthcare, who reported to him. Nvidia and Powell did not immediately respond to requests 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.
In a 2023 interview with an Israeli publication, Kress credited her two young sons with urging her to join Nvidia in 2013 because they knew its chips from their video games.
She became a billionaire in 2025 based on the value of her Nvidia equity, according to media reports, and Forbes said her net worth of $1.2 billion in mid-2026 put her in 32nd place on its list of America's richest self-made women.
Kress, who holds an undergraduate degree in finance and an MBA, was also named among the 50 most powerful women in business on rankings compiled by Fortune and Forbes magazines in recent years.
(Reporting by Alexandra Alper in Washington, and Max Cherney, Deepa Seetharaman and Krystal Hu in San Francisco; Writing by Sayantani Ghosh; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
