Who is Colette Kress, NVIDIA's interim CEO after Jensen Huang?

The timing is ugly. Days earlier the board said it would investigate Huang after he admitted to an affair with a former tech executive accused of being a Chinese intelligence asset. The New York Times later reported he also had an affair with an NVIDIA executive who reported to him. NVIDIA had no succession plan in place.

Who is Colette Kress?

Kress spent 25 years in finance before joining NVIDIA in 2013. She started with eight years at Texas Instruments, moved to Microsoft in 1997, and in 2006 became CFO of its Server and Tools division. In 2010 she went to Cisco, where she was senior vice president and CFO of the Business Technology and Operations Finance unit.

By her own account, Huang recruited her hard. She has said he sketched his vision on a whiteboard: make NVIDIA the dominant player in a still-young AI industry. That was years before the "Attention Is All You Need" transformer paper and nearly a decade before ChatGPT. She has also credited her sons, then eight and 10, who knew NVIDIA from gaming.

When she arrived, yearly revenue was $4.28 billion. In fiscal 2026 it was a record $215.9 billion.

What happens next for NVIDIA?

The board says it will weigh internal and external candidates for the permanent job, so Kress could keep it. In her first email to staff she called this an "extraordinarily difficult period" and thanked employees for their resilience.

There is pressure ahead. Huang has agreed to testify before Congress, with the House aiming for a hearing before Thanksgiving. House Foreign Affairs chair Brian Mast has not ruled out public hearings with other people. Scrutiny of NVIDIA is likely to grow, especially once Democrats take control of the House and Senate at the start of next year.