Nvidia's board of directors announced on Thursday, 12.11.2026, that longtime chief financial officer Colette Kress will serve as interim chief executive. She takes over from Jensen Huang, the chipmaker's CEO and cofounder, who resigned amid a scandal over an extramarital affair with a Chinese businesswoman whom US officials believe to be an asset of China's Ministry of State Security.
Harvey Jones, the newly appointed chair of Nvidia's board, said in a statement that Kress "has helped lead Nvidia through a period of extraordinary growth and has a deep understanding of our business, customers, operations and financial position." He added that she will be supported by an "experienced leadership team" and that the board has "full confidence" in her.
Multiple tech executives and industry analysts who follow Nvidia closely said Kress was among the most obvious candidates to fill the vacancy left by Huang's departure, citing her long tenure at the company, her credibility on Wall Street and across the tech industry, and, perhaps most importantly, her deep familiarity with Nvidia's business and finances.
"She's extremely strong-willed, professional, and whip smart. She doesn't tolerate nonsense. She can be friendly and gracious, too," said a former Nvidia executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "She obviously has a keen sense for how Jensen thinks."
"Colette is the logical choice," said Patrick Moorhead, founder and chief analyst at Moor Insights & Strategies, who has tracked the chip industry for decades. "She has credibility with investors because she answers hard questions directly." Moorhead said Kress has operated as much more than a "numbers" CFO: "In my conversations with her, she goes deep on the product roadmap, from rack-scale systems to networking and software."
Nvidia's board said on Sunday, 08.11.2026, that it was launching an independent investigation into Huang's activities, following a New York Times report that he had an affair with a woman named Alice Huang, whom US officials suspected of being a Chinese spy. WIRED reported on Monday, 09.11.2026, that Huang had quietly hired a crisis communications firm sometime in 2025 to handle matters related to his personal life. By October of that year, the firm was being looped in on all press inquiries involving Huang at Nvidia, around the same time the Times reported that US authorities were investigating whether a company linked to Alice Huang had helped Chinese firms evade US chip export controls.
While Huang has long been Nvidia's public face, Kress has managed the chipmaker's relationship with Wall Street. On earnings calls she frequently walks through the company's financial performance, customer demand, supply constraints, and other key metrics.
"One of the things we don't focus on is the stock price. We focus on our investors and how we would like to innovate," Kress told the Israeli business newspaper Globes in 2023.
Before joining Nvidia, Kress spent more than two decades in finance roles at Microsoft, Cisco, and Texas Instruments. Huang personally recruited her in 2013, when Nvidia was still best known for its gaming graphics cards, according to Globes. He laid out his vision for the company on a whiteboard, describing how Nvidia could become a major supplier of computing infrastructure for artificial intelligence.
Other potential successors to Huang included Ian Buck, an Nvidia veteran of more than 20 years who created the company's CUDA software platform and now oversees its high-performance computing business, and Jeff Fisher, who joined Nvidia in 1994 as head of software sales and later became senior vice president of its GeForce unit, where he led the company's strategy for bringing GPUs to market.
Nvidia's unusual corporate structure has long meant that dozens of executives report directly to Huang. The company has no traditional chief operating officer, and even executive vice presidents are not necessarily given direct control over budgets, sources have told WIRED. As a result, few people inside the organization understand the company's financials as well as Kress.
The former Nvidia executive said that while Kress is incredibly sharp and "can step into the [CEO] role immediately without needing any guidance," she does not have the engineering and technical expertise Huang brought to the role as a founding CEO. She has also shied away from being "at the center of public attention," the person said. Given the intense scrutiny surrounding Huang lately, that leadership style might prove a welcome temporary change for Nvidia.