Before His Ouster, Jensen Huang Belittled the Executive Replacing Him

Résumé détaillé

Interim CEO Colette Kress has questioned some Huang dealmaking. He called her ‘a deer in the headlights.’ | World News

Jensen Huang summoned his top finance executives to his office this summer. The AI economy, backstopped by Nvidia’s increasingly outrageous bets, was teetering, and Huang wanted to make sure they were getting it right.

Over the course of the meeting, he proceeded to tear into the woman who is now taking over for him as Nvidia CEO.

Colette Kress was “a deer in the headlights,” he said, interrupting her presentation, according to a person familiar with the comments.

He had summoned Kress and his senior finance team to diagnose a ballooning problem: Nvidia was in talks to provide billions of dollars of guarantees to companies that couldn’t afford its chips. That included deals led by Huang’s son-in-law, Nico Caprez, who had been offering upstart cloud providers and data-center developers financing in the hopes of turning them into long-term customers.

Huang had launched a dealmaking spree and was now starting to question whether it had gone too far, according to people familiar with the matter.

Kress was a “reporting CFO,” not someone who could help him define a strategy or make decisions, Huang said during the August meeting.

Then he went on to describe the situation the company was in. Major cloud providers were running away from Nvidia, making plans to use alternative chips and lessen their reliance on the firm. Even worse, Huang said, the vast supply of chip wafers and memory Nvidia had committed to buying were coming at him like an “avalanche.”

Kress now has to steer Nvidia through that avalanche—and a bigger one. She was named interim chief executive Thursday, taking over for Huang, who resigned after revelations of two extramarital affairs, including one with a suspected Chinese spy and another with an employee.

Kress will need to stabilize a company facing federal and internal investigations. One of the largest companies in the world didn’t have a clear successor lined up. It has said it will look at internal and external CEO candidates.

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