Colette Kress, Nvidia’s chief financial officer, is now running the company whose chips underpin the AI buildout. The board announced Thursday morning that co-founder Jensen Huang resigned as president, CEO, and director, effective immediately, and named Kress interim chief executive. TechCrunch put the company’s value at about $3.8 trillion.
TechCrunch describes Huang as ousted. Its account ties the exit to reports that he had affairs with an alleged Chinese spy and with one of his direct reports at Nvidia. Those remain reports and allegations, and the board’s announcement is the only confirmed part: a resignation with immediate effect. We cover the allegations separately.
The succession problem is the bigger business story. Huang led Nvidia for 33 years and, according to TechCrunch, never established a succession plan. The board now has to run a search for a permanent CEO while the company keeps shipping to customers who plan their own data center budgets around Nvidia’s roadmap.
Kress’s record explains why the board reached for her. She has been at Nvidia since September 2013, which makes her tenure more than 13 years. Before that she spent three years at Cisco as senior vice president and CFO of its Business Technology Operations Finance group. Earlier still she spent 13 years at Microsoft, including four as CFO of the Server and Tools division. Her degrees are in finance, from the University of Arizona, and an MBA from Southern Methodist University.
That résumé is finance work at enterprise infrastructure businesses, then more than a decade inside Nvidia. It reads as continuity. Nothing in TechCrunch’s profile points to a strategy reset, and none of the roles it lists involved running engineering or product.
Her public profile is thin. TechCrunch, which lists her as a 59-year-old based in California, says she barely registers on social media. She is, however, a regular voice on Nvidia’s earnings calls, so analysts who cover the stock already know how she talks about the numbers. Forbes estimates her net worth at about $1.2 billion, and its profile says she first joined Nvidia partly because her two sons praised the company for its role in video games, which was its main reputation at the time.
Kress’s statement leans on continuity too. She said she is committed to building on the “extraordinary foundation Jensen created” and that the focus stays on customers, partners, developers, and shareholders. The statement gives no timeline for the search, no description of who will make product decisions in the interim, and no indication of what Huang’s departure from the board means for the company’s direction.
An interim CEO with a CFO’s background changes the question investors are asking. For three decades the answer to “who decides” at Nvidia was one person. Now the answer is a finance executive holding a seat that may or may not become hers, while a board that just lost its founder picks the next leader.
Nvidia is scheduled to report quarterly earnings on Tuesday, and TechCrunch expects Kress to say more then about the near-term plan. Anyone with multiyear chip commitments or a product roadmap built on Nvidia hardware should treat that call as the first real read on whether the interim stewardship holds the line or starts to drift.
Reported by TechCrunch on November 12, 2026.
