Colette Kress, Nvidia’s chief financial officer since 2013, is now its interim chief executive. The board appointed her after accepting Jensen Huang’s resignation, effective immediately, and she will keep the CFO job while it searches for a permanent CEO, according to Nvidia’s announcement on Thursday.
That puts a 59-year-old finance executive, not an engineer, in charge of the company at the center of the AI chip boom. Nvidia’s shares fell as much as 13% in the first minutes of trading, Yahoo Finance reported, before paring some of the loss. Our news story on Huang’s resignation covers what the board said about him and how the stock traded.
She keeps the CFO job while the board searches
The details are in an 8-K filed with the SEC on Thursday. The board accepted Huang’s resignation on Nov. 11 as president, CEO and director. It then named Kress interim CEO “while the Board conducts a search,” and the filing says she “will continue in that role” as executive vice president and CFO.
The release says the search will consider internal and external candidates. The board also created a chair’s post for the first time and gave it to Harvey C. Jones, 73, a director since 1993 and a former Synopsys CEO.
Jones said the board has “full confidence in Colette and the leadership team.” He said it expects operations, customer commitments and the product roadmap “to continue without interruption.”
Kress said she was “committed to building on the extraordinary foundation Jensen created over the last 33 years.” In a message to staff quoted by Yahoo Finance, she said she believes “deeply in the company” and called its employees, known internally as NVIDIANs, its “greatest strength.”
Three decades in finance at TI, Microsoft and Cisco
Kress has spent her whole career in finance, mostly at large tech companies. Nvidia’s 2026 annual report gives the sequence.
She started with eight years in finance roles at Texas Instruments, the chipmaker. From 1997 to 2010 she worked at Microsoft, and from 2006 she was CFO of its Server and Tools division. In 2010 she moved to Cisco as senior vice president and CFO of its Business Technology and Operations Finance organization.
Nvidia hired her as executive vice president and CFO in September 2013. She holds a bachelor’s degree in finance from the University of Arizona and an MBA from Southern Methodist University.
Investors know her voice better than her face. On Nvidia’s earnings calls she gives the prepared financial review and the next quarter’s forecast before Huang speaks. On the November 2025 call, for example, she forecast fourth-quarter revenue of “$65 billion plus or minus 2%,” according to the transcript published by The Motley Fool.
Kress’s pay, stock and 13 years at Nvidia
Pay in this table comes from the summary compensation table in the 2026 proxy statement. Holdings come from the proxy and her latest Form 4. Revenue comes from the 2026 annual report and the fiscal 2015 annual report, which shows the year before she arrived.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Age | 59 (8-K, Nov. 12, 2026) |
| Time as CFO | 13 years, 2 months (since September 2013) |
| Total pay, fiscal 2024 | $13.27 million |
| Total pay, fiscal 2025 | $21.36 million |
| Total pay, fiscal 2026 | $14.34 million |
| Of which salary, fiscal 2026 | $898,577 |
| Shares reported after Sept. 17, 2026 | 4,775,733 |
| Unvested stock awards, Jan. 25, 2026 | 569,889 units ($107.0 million at $187.67) |
| Revenue, fiscal 2013 (year before she joined) | $4.28 billion |
| Revenue, fiscal 2026 | $215.9 billion |
Stock awards made up $12.8 million of her $14.3 million in fiscal 2026, the year to Jan. 25.
The share figure is our sum of the nine holdings on her Sept. 17 Form 4: 765,103 held directly, plus shares in trusts, an LLC and family members’ names. At the $219 or so she received in that day’s sales, they were worth about $1.05 billion, before Thursday’s drop.
She sold 34,918 shares that day under a Rule 10b5-1 trading plan adopted on June 16, which sets sales in advance.
Revenue grew about 50-fold between fiscal 2013 and fiscal 2026, by our arithmetic ($215.9 billion divided by $4.28 billion). Net income rose from $563 million to $120.1 billion.
That growth came under Huang, with Kress running finance. It shows the scale of what she now runs, not her share of the credit.
Analysts know her, but a CFO in the top job is unusual
Wall Street’s first reactions focused on continuity. Dan Ives of Yorkville told Yahoo Finance that Kress “has built enormous credibility internally and externally.” A Bernstein note quoted in the same live blog said “Colette should be able to keep things running for now.”
Finance chiefs rarely become CEO at the biggest tech companies. Bloomberg made that point in January, when it reported Nvidia had no clear successor, as our look at Nvidia’s succession bench explained. Her title is interim, and the board has not said whether she is a candidate for the permanent job.
She also now answers to a board that has been under scrutiny since it opened an independent investigation into Huang on Nov. 8. Our guide to Nvidia’s board lists who sits on it.
Nov. 17 will be her first earnings call in charge
Nvidia said it will report third-quarter fiscal 2027 results on Tuesday, Nov. 17, “as previously scheduled.” The earnings call starts at 5 p.m. Eastern time.
Neither the release nor the 8-K says who will present. On past calls Kress has delivered the financial results and the forecast, and Huang followed with his remarks. Whoever presents, the executive who has read out those numbers for 13 years is now also the one answering for the company.
