The appointment and the duties
Nvidia formalized on November 12, 2026 the appointment of Colette Kress as interim chief executive officer, after the board accepted on November 11 Jensen Huang's resignation with immediate effect. AI4Business reports this, citing the 8-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Huang, co-founder and sole CEO since the company's founding in 1993, also stepped down from the chairmanship and the board.
Kress, 59, retains the roles of executive vice president and chief financial officer, a position she has held since September 2013. Her mandate is to ensure continuity for a group that has become central to the artificial intelligence industry while the board evaluates internal and external candidates; no deadline has been set for the interim period. The new board chairman is Harvey C. Jones, a board member since 1993 with a background at Synopsys: the choice separates the chairmanship from day-to-day management, which had previously been concentrated in Huang.
Her profile and the growth figures
Kress's background is in economics and finance, not engineering: finance studies at the University of Arizona and a master's in business administration from Southern Methodist University. She began at Texas Instruments in finance roles for about eight years, moved to Microsoft from 1997 to 2010, leading finance for the Server and Tools division for four years, and then to Cisco as finance head of the Business Technology and Operations Finance Organization. At her 2013 appointment, Huang highlighted her experience at large technology companies.
The scale of the change emerges from the financial statements cited in the article: Nvidia had revenue of $4.13 billion in the fiscal year Kress arrived; on February 25, 2026, it reported annual revenue of $215.9 billion, up 65% from the previous fiscal year. In the second quarter of fiscal 2027, ended July 26, 2026, revenue was $96.2 billion, of which $89 billion came from data centers. The figure cannot be attributed to the CFO alone: it reflects technology choices and global demand for AI computing capacity. Kress is a regular presence on quarterly conference calls, where she presents revenue, margins, product availability and market outlook.
Wall Street relations, compensation and open issues
In June 2024, Wedbush analyst Dan Ives named her to Fortune as a key executive in relations between Nvidia and Wall Street. In remarks in May 2026, reported by Fortune, she said that AI is no longer merely optional, referring to its adoption as a productivity tool across multiple sectors. Reuters, however, reported on November 13, 2026, citing anonymous sources, that Kress had challenged certain financing transactions proposed by the founder and the business group, concerning investments in AI ecosystem companies including OpenAI and infrastructure providers: the account does not describe a decision formally attributed to Kress in corporate documents.
The May 2026 shareholder document reports total compensation for Kress for fiscal year 2026 of $14,340,850, including approximately $899,000 in salary, $600,000 in variable compensation and $12.8 million in stock awards. Forbes estimated her net worth at $1.2 billion as of June 3, 2026, a valuation tied mainly to Nvidia shares and therefore sensitive to market fluctuations. The transition also comes after reports about the former CEO's personal relationships and suspicions of possible implications for U.S. national security: the espionage allegations reported by the press are not judicially established facts, and Beijing has rejected them.
