Jensen Huang Resigns As NVIDIA CEO: Colette Kress Named…

Jensen Huang has stepped down as CEO of NVIDIA, ending a 33-year run at the AI and gaming company he founded. The board announced the resignation Thursday and named Colette Kress, the company’s executive vice president and chief financial officer, as interim chief executive.

Harvey Jones, who was also named NVIDIA’s first-ever board chair, addressed the transition in a release. “The Board has full confidence in Colette and the leadership team, and we expect the company’s operations, customer commitments and product roadmap to continue without interruption,” he said.

The change follows days of upheaval. NVIDIA’s board said it would investigate Huang after he admitted to an affair with a tech executive who has been reported to be a Chinese intelligence asset. The board has said it has no reason to believe NVIDIA trade secrets or national security were compromised. The New York Times later reported that Huang also had a relationship with an NVIDIA executive who reported to him. The company had no succession plan in place before the news broke.

Who Is Colette Kress, NVIDIA’s Interim CEO?

Kress has served as NVIDIA’s CFO since joining in 2013, and she will keep that title while she serves as interim CEO. Although she is less publicly known than Huang, she has been a regular presence on the company’s earnings calls.

Her path to NVIDIA ran through three major tech companies. She spent eight years in finance roles at Texas Instruments, then joined Microsoft in 1997. In 2006, she became CFO of Microsoft’s Server and Tools division, and she stayed until 2010. She then moved to Cisco as senior vice president and CFO of its Business Technology and Operations Finance unit.

How Huang Recruited Kress to NVIDIA

By Kress’s own account, Huang pursued her personally. Before she joined in 2013, he sketched his vision for the company on a whiteboard. According to a 2023 interview, that vision was for NVIDIA to become the leading player in the emerging AI industry.

The pitch came years before Google researchers published “Attention Is All You Need,” the 2017 paper that introduced transformer models, and nearly a decade before ChatGPT’s release. Kress has partly credited her two sons, then ages eight and 10, for helping her say yes. Both already knew NVIDIA from gaming. In a 2024 Fortune interview, she said NVIDIA was the smallest company she had ever worked for when she arrived.

NVIDIA Revenue Growth Under Kress

NVIDIA’s annual revenue was $4.28 billion when Kress started. In fiscal 2026, the company reported a record $215.9 billion.

NVIDIA CEO Search: What Happens Next

The board has said it will consider both internal and external candidates for the permanent CEO job, which leaves open the possibility that Kress or another current NVIDIA employee could be chosen.

Kress addressed employees in her first email after the announcement, according to CNBC. “The Board, [executive staff] and I recognize that this has been an extraordinarily difficult period and I want you to know how grateful we are for your resilience, professionalism and continued dedication,” she wrote.

Outside pressure is building as well. U.S. lawmakers have called for Huang to appear before congressional committees and have threatened a subpoena if he does not. Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz partner Joon H. Kim, a former federal prosecutor, is leading the board’s independent investigation.