KEY POINTS
- Nvidia's board named CFO Colette Kress interim CEO after Jensen Huang resigned.
- Analysts and a former executive described her as the logical choice because of her financial command and credibility with investors.
- Nvidia's structure, with dozens of direct reports to Huang and no chief operating officer, narrowed the pool of internal successors.
Nvidia has named chief financial officer Colette Kress as its interim chief executive, the company's board announced on Thursday. The move follows the resignation of cofounder Jensen Huang, WIRED reported.
Harvey Jones, the newly appointed chair of the board, said in a statement that Kress has helped steer Nvidia through a period of "extraordinary growth". He said she will be backed by an experienced leadership team and that the board has "full confidence" in her.
According to WIRED, Huang left amid a scandal over an extramarital affair. The board said on Sunday it was opening an independent investigation into his activities after The New York Times published a report on the matter. The investigation was still under way at the time of the WIRED report.
Tech executives and industry analysts who follow Nvidia told WIRED that Kress was one of the most obvious candidates for the job. They pointed to her long tenure, her standing on Wall Street and across the industry, and her deep knowledge of the company's business and finances. Patrick Moorhead, founder of Moor Insights & Strategies, called her "the logical choice" and said she has credibility with investors because she answers hard questions directly. He added that she is far more than a "numbers" CFO, and that she goes deep on the product road map, including rack-scale systems, networking and software.
Kress joined Nvidia in 2013 and has been the company's main contact with Wall Street. On earnings calls she typically walks through financial results, customer demand and supply constraints. Before Nvidia she spent more than two decades in finance roles at Microsoft, Cisco and Texas Instruments. Globes reported that Huang recruited her personally, when Nvidia was still best known for gaming graphics cards, and sketched on a whiteboard how it could become a major supplier of computing infrastructure for artificial intelligence.
WIRED said other possible successors included Ian Buck, a veteran of more than 20 years who created the CUDA software platform and now runs the high-performance computing business, and Jeff Fisher, a senior vice president who led the go-to-market strategy for the GeForce unit. Nvidia's unusual structure, however, 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, according to sources cited by WIRED. Few people inside the company understand its finances as well as Kress does.
A former Nvidia executive, speaking anonymously, said Kress could step into the role immediately without guidance. The person added that she lacks the engineering and technical background Huang brought to the job, and that she has tended to avoid the center of public attention. WIRED noted that, given the scrutiny around Huang, such a low-key style could be a welcome change for the company in the short term.
