59-year-old Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress has temporarily taken over Nvidia while the company searches for a permanent successor, UNN reports, citing Reuters.
Details
The publication notes that Colette Kress was, for many years, the only executive at Nvidia willing to rein in CEO Jensen Huang’s ambitious, often risky plans. According to two people familiar with the situation, when Huang pushed for the chipmaker’s deeper involvement in multibillion-dollar investments in artificial intelligence (AI), Kress opposed it.
The 59-year-old CFO has now temporarily taken over the company while Nvidia searches for a permanent successor. On Thursday, Huang left the company he co-founded and led for three decades — and did so amid a scandal. Nvidia will now have to undergo a leadership transition for the first time without the "architect" of its success.
Sources say that, despite their conflicts, Kress served as an important counterbalance to Huang. His successes gave him considerable freedom to make key decisions. Several months before news emerged that Huang had had a relationship with a woman suspected of spying for China, some on Wall Street began questioning whether his appetite for risk was justified. Questions also arose over whether the deals he struck were helping create a kind of "closed" economy in the AI sector.
According to one of the sources, Kress and her team clashed with Huang and the sales department over large and risky financial deals. Some Wall Street critics believed these deals were creating a "closed" AI ecosystem — specifically, investments in OpenAI and companies involved in AI infrastructure, such as Lambda.
The proposal to allocate $250 billion to support the development of an OpenAI data center project in the state of Ohio was ultimately reduced to $120 billion.
"It is unlikely that anyone other than Jensen would have invested in their own customers so aggressively," said a third source, a venture capitalist. According to him, it was Huang who insisted that Nvidia provide financing to startups.