The resignation and the new leadership structure
On November 12, Nvidia announced that Huang Renxun had stepped down from the roles of chairman, chief executive officer and board member. Succeeding him as interim CEO is Colette Kress, who also retains the role of CFO. The board said it will evaluate internal and external candidates for the permanent succession, according to IT之家 based on a Wall Street Journal article dated November 12.
The transition comes at a delicate moment: the company is among the most highly capitalized in the world, and Kress inherits a framework of complex financial commitments built during the co-founder's tenure.
The rift over financial guarantees
According to the Wall Street Journal, in the summer Huang convened top financial executives to examine the growth of investments in artificial intelligence infrastructure. During an August meeting, as Kress presented the data, Huang interrupted her, calling her a CFO who merely reports the numbers, not a strategic partner, and comparing her to a deer caught in the headlights.
The sticking point was Nvidia's plan to support, with multibillion-dollar guarantees, companies unable to buy its chips directly. Part of the negotiations was handled by Nico Caprez, Huang's son-in-law and a vice president since January, with the aim of turning new cloud operators into long-term customers. Kress raised reservations about project selection, risk assessment and return calculation, and according to people familiar with the matter, she had slowed the pace of the deals behind the scenes. Huang also feared competition from the large cloud providers, which were increasingly less dependent on Nvidia, and the arrival of stockpiles of wafers and memory: he spoke of an avalanche on its way.
The OpenAI case and the scaling back
Nvidia was negotiating a guarantee for OpenAI's data center project in Ohio, where the company was expected to install roughly $300 billion worth of chips. In July, the Wall Street Journal reported a hypothesized guarantee of about $250 billion: the following day the stock fell about 5%, wiping out a similar amount of market capitalization. According to the sources, Kress then revised the plan, halving the initial commitment; the reduced agreement was signed on August 17.
Documents filed with the SEC cite an arrangement with SB Energy for a guarantee of up to $105 billion for the PORTS Technology Campus, tied to about 4.25 gigawatts of capacity and subject to progress on construction and leasing. In late August, some operations under the program were suspended pending review by management and the board, while in October Huang hardened his stance, telling cloud customer CEOs the story of a Japanese soup counter that refuses a second serving so as not to exhaust its inventory and accusing them of not valuing his products.
What remains to be verified
The internal accounts are based on anonymous sources reported by the Wall Street Journal and have not been officially confirmed by Nvidia. Still to be clarified are the exact terms of the guarantee plan that remains active, the effect on relations with OpenAI and cloud customers, and the timing of the succession. Kress has publicly defended Nvidia's role as a financier in the AI sector, denying criticism of circular financing and arguing that the return on capital will be significant. The decline in the average monthly price/earnings ratio, from 23 in May to 16 in October according to the Wall Street Journal, is the figure that frames investor pressure.
