Who Is Colette Kress? Nvidia's New Interim CEO, Explained

Colette Kress, Nvidia's executive vice president and chief financial officer since September 2013, is now also the company's interim chief executive officer. The board named her to the role on November 12, 2026, hours after Jensen Huang resigned as president, CEO and a board member, effective immediately. Kress keeps the CFO title while she runs the company day to day, and the board — now led for the first time by a standalone chair, Harvey C. Jones — says it has opened a search for a permanent CEO and will weigh both internal and external candidates, with no timeline announced.

Who is Colette Kress?

Kress is Nvidia's chief financial officer and, as of November 12, its interim chief executive. She joined the company in September 2013 as executive vice president and CFO and has held that job for more than 13 years, making her one of the longest-tenured senior executives at Nvidia outside of Huang himself. For most investors who have followed Nvidia through its run from a graphics-chip maker to the center of the AI buildout, Kress is already a familiar voice: she has co-anchored every quarterly earnings call alongside Huang, walking through revenue segments, data-center demand and guidance.

That history is part of why the board turned to her for the interim role rather than to an outside caretaker. According to Nvidia's 8-K filing announcing the transition, Kress "has agreed to serve as interim Chief Executive Officer while continuing in her role as EVP and CFO." She is not stepping away from the finance seat to take the top job on a trial basis — she is holding both at once, at least for now. That dual-hat arrangement is itself notable: running finance and the overall company simultaneously is a heavier load than most interim chiefs carry, and it signals the board wanted continuity in the CFO seat just as much as it wanted a steady hand in the CEO chair. Nvidia covered the resignation itself as breaking news in a separate report on Huang's exit; this piece focuses on Kress, the mechanics of an interim CEO role, and what happens next.

Her career before Nvidia

Kress's background is almost entirely in corporate finance, not chip engineering or product management, which matters for understanding what she is — and isn't — likely to change at Nvidia in the near term. Nvidia's own 2013 announcement of her hiring describes her at the time as a "24-year veteran of the tech industry," then 46 years old, who had spent nearly 25 years in finance roles at technology companies before joining Nvidia.

Immediately before Nvidia, she spent three years as senior vice president and CFO of Cisco's Business Technology and Operations Finance organization, where she oversaw financial strategy, planning, reporting and business development for that unit. Before Cisco, she spent 13 years at Microsoft, including four years as CFO of the company's Server and Tools division, along with earlier senior roles in corporate planning and finance. Earlier still, she held a variety of finance positions at Texas Instruments. She holds a B.Sc. in finance from the University of Arizona and an MBA from Southern Methodist University. When she joined Nvidia in 2013, the release notes she reported to the company's then-CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang — the same executive, using his full first name, who resigned as Jensen Huang this week.

In other words, Kress has spent her entire career on the financial and operational side of large technology companies, not in a chief-executive seat. That's typical for interim CEOs pulled from the CFO ranks, and it's one reason boards tend to frame these appointments as stabilizing moves rather than a signal about the eventual permanent pick.

What does "interim CEO" actually mean?

"Interim CEO" is not a formal legal title with a fixed set of powers — it's a label a board attaches to signal that the person holding the chief executive role is a bridge, not necessarily the board's long-term choice, while a formal search is underway. In practice, an interim CEO typically has the same day-to-day authority as any CEO: they can run operations, speak for the company publicly, sign off on routine business decisions and represent the company to customers, employees and investors. What usually changes is the degree of board oversight and the appetite for big, hard-to-reverse moves — major acquisitions, large layoffs, a strategic pivot — which boards often prefer to leave for whoever is named permanently, partly to avoid committing a successor to decisions they didn't make.

Nvidia's board has been explicit that it does not want this transition to disrupt the business. Board Chair Harvey C. Jones said in the same 8-K that "the Board has full confidence in Colette and the leadership team" and that "we expect the company's operations, customer commitments and product roadmap to continue without interruption." Kress herself struck a similar note, saying "NVIDIA's strength has always come from its people" and that "our focus remains on serving our customers, partners, developers and shareholders." She also said she is "committed to building on the extraordinary foundation Jensen created over the last 33 years" — language aimed squarely at reassuring customers and partners that Nvidia's roadmap, not just its org chart, is unchanged.

At large public companies generally, interim CEOs tend to fall into two camps: a sitting executive (often the CFO or COO) who keeps the trains running while a formal search plays out, or a board member who steps in temporarily, sometimes explicitly ruling themselves out of the permanent job to keep the search neutral. Nvidia hasn't said which camp Kress falls into — the 8-K does not state whether she is or isn't a candidate for the permanent role — and that ambiguity is itself normal; many boards prefer not to telegraph a preferred successor while a formal process is still open to outside candidates.

What changes, and what doesn't, during the interim period

Nvidia hasn't published a detailed list of what is and isn't delegated to Kress specifically — the 8-K is a disclosure document, not an operating manual — so the table below separates what the company has explicitly said from what is generally true of interim CEOs at large public companies.

Who is Harvey C. Jones, Nvidia's new board chair?

The other new name in this transition is Harvey C. Jones, whom Nvidia's board appointed as its first-ever standalone Chair. Per the company's own announcement, Jones has more than 30 years of experience as an entrepreneur, technology executive and active venture investor, and he previously served as CEO and Executive Chairman of Synopsys, the chip-design software company. Nvidia had not previously had a separate, standalone board chair position — this is a new role at the company, created alongside the CEO transition rather than before it.

Jones's public comments so far have focused on continuity and confidence in Kress rather than on strategy changes. Beyond praising her and the leadership team, he credited her with having "helped lead NVIDIA through a period of extraordinary growth" — a reference to her tenure as CFO through Nvidia's run from a PC-graphics supplier to the dominant supplier of AI data-center chips.

Nvidia's CEO transition timeline so far

Here's what's been confirmed and what's scheduled next, based on Nvidia's SEC filing and newsroom statement.

What investors and customers should watch next

The most immediate event on the calendar is Nvidia's Q3 fiscal 2027 earnings report and call this coming Tuesday, November 17, which will be Kress's first as interim CEO rather than as the CFO fielding questions alongside a sitting chief executive. Investors will be listening for whether demand commentary, data-center guidance and capital-spending plans from customers change in tone now that Kress — rather than Huang — is leading the call. Nvidia's chip roadmap and supply commitments sit downstream of a dense web of partners, from foundries to the hyperscalers and AI labs buying its GPUs; any of today's coverage of TSMC's capacity and capex commitments or of AI-lab customers like Anthropic's path to a public listing is a reminder of how many stakeholders are watching Nvidia's leadership stability closely.

Beyond the earnings call, the things worth tracking are the ones Nvidia's own newsroom and board flagged: whether "customer commitments and product roadmap" visibly continue "without interruption," as Jones promised, and how the board paces its CEO search — whether it moves quickly toward a single candidate or runs a longer, more public process. Nvidia has given no timeline for naming a permanent CEO, and has not said whether Kress herself is a candidate for the permanent job or is serving strictly as a caretaker.

What's next

For now, Nvidia's day-to-day business is explicitly meant to look unchanged: Kress is running the company while also closing the books as CFO, Jones is chairing a board that is actively searching for a permanent chief executive, and the company's first public test of that arrangement arrives in days, not months, with the November 17 earnings call. The open questions — how long the search takes, whether Kress is a candidate for the permanent role, and whether the board's confidence in "continuity" holds up once a full quarter closes under new leadership — don't have public answers yet. Pandromeda will follow Nvidia's disclosures as the search progresses and as more detail emerges from the November 17 call.

Written byMara Lindqvist

Mara Lindqvist edits the hardware desk. She covers graphics cards, processors, memory and storage, the foundries and chip designers behind them, and what the numbers on a spec sheet mean for people choosing a PC. Specifications in her stories come from manufacturer spec pages and datasheets.

More from Mara LindqvistAll Hardware coverage