Nvidia appointed Colette Kress, the company's chief financial officer and executive vice president, to serve as interim CEO following Jensen Huang's resignation over his extramarital affair with an alleged Chinese spy and a subsequent investigation by the board.
Kress, 59, will continue in her current roles as the interim CEO while the board searches for a permanent replacement, the company said in a statement. Before joining Nvidia in 2013, she served as senior vice president and CFO of the business technology and operations finance organization at technology company Cisco.
From 1997 to 2010, Kress was at Microsoft, serving as the CFO of the server and tools division starting in 2006. Prior to Microsoft, she spent eight years at the semiconductor
company Texas Instruments.
Kress is one of the few chief financial officers to become a billionaire, surpassing the milestone in 2025 when Nvidia climbed past a $4 trillion market cap, according to Bloomberg's billionaire index. Forbes ranked Kress at 32 on its 2026 list of America’s richest self-made women.
"Colette has helped lead NVIDIA through a period of extraordinary growth and has a deep understanding of our business, customers, operations and financial position,” Nvidia board chair Harvey Jones said in the statement. “She is supported by an experienced leadership team that has been instrumental in executing NVIDIA’s strategy and advancing its technology roadmap.”
Kress graduated from the University of Arizona with a bachelors in finance before earning an MBA from Southern Methodist University's school of business in 1996, according to Nvidia's annual report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
She is married to fellow tech executive David Kress, who spent three decades at Microsoft. They have two sons.
Greta Reich covers the artificial intelligence industry for USA TODAY through a fellowship from the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism. Funders do not provide editorial input.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Who is Colette Kress, Nvidia's interim CEO?
