Who Is Colette Kress, Named New NVIDIA CEO

Colette Kress, NVIDIA’s chief financial officer for the past 13 years, has been named interim CEO after Jensen Huang’s resignation. She will hold the CEO role alongside her CFO job until the board finds a permanent successor. The appointment puts a finance executive, rather than an engineer or product visionary, in charge of the world’s most valuable chipmaker at one of the most delicate moments in its history.

Here is a look at who she is, where she came from, and what she has done at NVIDIA.

At A Glance

Early Career: Texas Instruments

Kress began her career in finance at Texas Instruments, where she spent about eight years in a variety of finance roles. She earned her MBA in finance at SMU’s Cox School of Business between 1994 and 1996, in Dallas, where Texas Instruments is headquartered. She holds an undergraduate degree in finance from the University of Arizona.

Microsoft: 13 Years, Ending As CFO Of Server And Tools

Kress moved to Microsoft in 1997 and stayed for more than 13 years, holding senior roles in corporate planning and finance. In 2006 she became CFO of the Server and Tools division, the business that sold products such as Windows Server, SQL Server and developer tools to enterprises, and she held that role for four years. Her LinkedIn profile lists her as a corporate vice president at Microsoft from April 2006 to November 2010.

Cisco: A Three-Year Stint Inside The Machine

In November 2010 she joined Cisco as Senior Vice President and CFO of its Business Technology and Operations Finance organization. The role covered financial strategy, planning, reporting and business development across Cisco’s business segments, engineering and operations. She stayed until September 2013, when NVIDIA hired her.

By then she had spent nearly 25 years in finance at major technology companies, a résumé that spanned semiconductors, software and networking.

Joining NVIDIA In 2013

Kress became NVIDIA’s executive vice president and CFO in September 2013. At the time, NVIDIA was still largely known as a graphics chip company that served gamers and professional visualization customers, and its market value had yet to reach $10 billion. She has said that when she arrived, it was the smallest company she had ever worked for.

As CFO, she runs financial planning, investor relations and corporate development. She is one of NVIDIA’s four executive vice presidents, and the executive investors hear from at the start of every quarterly earnings call. Her recognition came early: in 2016, the Silicon Valley Business Journal named her CFO of the Year.

Steering NVIDIA Through The AI Boom

The decade that followed made NVIDIA unrecognisable. The company’s data center business, built on the GPUs that train and run AI models, grew from a side segment into the core of the business.

The numbers speak for themselves. NVIDIA’s revenue more than doubled in fiscal 2025 to $130.5 billion, and then grew another 65% in fiscal 2026 to $215.9 billion. On the earnings call for that year, Kress said NVIDIA had scaled its data center business by nearly 13 times since ChatGPT arrived in fiscal 2023. She also told investors that the company had visibility to $500 billion in revenue from its Blackwell and Rubin platforms across calendar 2025 and 2026, and that it believes annual AI infrastructure investment could reach $3 trillion to $4 trillion by 2029 or 2030.

Along the way, NVIDIA’s market capitalisation climbed past milestones that once seemed unthinkable. It became the first company to touch $4 trillion in July 2025 and later the first to touch $5 trillion.

Kress has also been NVIDIA’s public voice on the harder questions. On the fiscal 2026 call, she noted that while small quantities of H200 chips for China had been approved by the U.S. government, NVIDIA had not yet generated any revenue from them, and warned that Chinese competitors could eventually disrupt the structure of the global AI industry. She has also set margin targets for the company, with the goal of holding gross margins in the mid-70s percent range.

Wedbush analyst Dan Ives has described her leadership as instrumental to NVIDIA’s success with Wall Street and key to Huang’s vision, and has said she is highly respected both inside the company and across the industry.

Recognition And Wealth

Kress ranked 55th on Forbes’ list of the world’s most powerful women in 2024, and 44th on Fortune’s Most Powerful Women list in 2025. She moved to No. 49 on Fortune’s 2026 list. In July 2025, Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index put her net worth above $1 billion for the first time, driven almost entirely by her NVIDIA stock. She joined sales chief Jay Puri in becoming one of NVIDIA’s billionaire executives, alongside Huang. Her fortune moves with NVIDIA’s share price, and some estimates since then have put it a little under or around that mark.

A Finance Chief In The CEO Seat

Kress was widely seen as the most likely internal name for an interim role. When the board was reportedly working with an outside firm to line up replacements, outside governance experts had floated her as a possible stopgap, and an earlier look at the executives who could succeed Huang put her at the top of the list.

Her case rests on knowing NVIDIA’s numbers and commitments better than almost anyone and on her credibility with Wall Street at a time when investor confidence is fragile. The counterarguments are just as clear: reports have said she is not seen as a long-term pick, and tech giants rarely choose a finance chief as CEO. She is, in the words of the analysis at the time, the steady-hand option rather than the visionary one.

It is also a very different job from the one she has had. Huang ran NVIDIA with an unusual structure, with no chief operating officer and around 60 people reporting directly to him, and he had said that his eventual successor would have to reshape the company to suit themselves. Kress will now have to run it as it is, while still doing her day job as CFO.

In the announcement, she said she was committed to building on the foundation Huang created over 33 years, and that NVIDIA’s focus remains on serving customers, partners, developers and shareholders. The board, led by newly appointed Chair Harvey C. Jones, said it expects operations, customer commitments and the product roadmap to continue without interruption.

What Happens Next

Her first big test arrives within days. NVIDIA will report third-quarter fiscal 2027 results on Tuesday, November 17, with the earnings call at 2 p.m. PT, as previously scheduled. It will be Kress, a familiar voice on these calls, who fronts it as interim CEO. The board has said it will consider both internal and external candidates for the permanent job, so it is not yet clear whether the interim title will become permanent.

Kress’s age, education and career details are based on her LinkedIn profile, NVIDIA’s executive biography as reproduced by public profiles, and Fortune, Bloomberg and company filings. Net worth figures are estimates and change with NVIDIA’s share price. This is not investment advice.