Who is Colette Kress, the interim CEO replacing Jensen Huang at Nvidia

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Colette Kress often pushed back against Jensen Huang’s riskier AI bets. Now Nvidia’s longtime CFO is running the company while it searches for a new CEO.

Colette Kress often pushed back against Jensen Huang’s riskier AI bets. Now Nvidia’s longtime CFO is running the company while it searches for a new CEO.

WASHINGTON/SAN FRANCISCO: 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 (Nov 12).

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 down from 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 US$250 billion plan to support an OpenAI data centre project in Ohio was ultimately pared to US$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.

People who know her describe Kress as a calming contrast to Huang’s often confrontational style.

"Colette is a pragmatist," said a…

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