Nvidia said on Thursday that Colette Kress, the company’s chief financial officer, would be the company’s interim chief executive officer, following the resignation of its longtime leader, Jensen Huang, who admitted to an extramarital affair with a businesswoman U.S. intelligence agencies believe to be a spy for China.
“The board has full confidence in Colette and the leadership team,” said Harvey C. Jones, the newly named chair of Nvidia’s board of directors in a statement. “We expect the company’s operations, customer commitments and product roadmap to continue without interruption.”
In a note to Nvidia’s employees, Ms. Kress said she believed “deeply in this company” and called its employees “our greatest strength.” She said Nvidia would have a companywide meeting on Nov. 18 to discuss its future.
She will remain Nvidia’s chief financial officer while serving as its interim chief executive officer until the board names a permanent successor. The board said on Thursday that it had started a search for that replacement and would consider internal and external candidates. Nvidia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Ms. Kress, who joined Nvidia in 2013, is leading the company as it enters an uncertain next chapter. Under the leadership of Mr. Huang, Nvidia grew from a niche maker of computer chips used for video games to one of the most valuable public companies in the world and the linchpin of the artificial intelligence boom. Nvidia controls an estimated 90 percent of the market for the chips used in the big A.I. projects that are driving the U.S. economy.
Ms. Kress, 59, faces a challenging road. She is temporarily taking over a company that has been tightly controlled by her predecessor. Mr. Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and had managed all aspects of its business with a flat structure that placed him at the center of its day-to-day operations.
His family members had steadily risen through its ranks in recent years. And while Ms. Kress is already familiar to Wall Street, she does not have Mr. Huang’s relationships with Nvidia’s sprawling supply chain or Washington.
Ms. Kress has a bachelor’s degree in finance from the University of Arizona and a master’s degree in business administration from Southern Methodist University. She previously worked in finance at Texas Instruments, Microsoft and Cisco, before joining Nvidia in 2013.
Mr. Huang interviewed 22 candidates before hiring Ms. Kress as chief financial officer. At the time, Ms. Kress’s young sons, who were avid gamers, encouraged her to join Nvidia. During her first week on the job, Ms. Kress asked Mr. Huang how long he thought he would want her in the role.
“I said, ‘For as long as we shall live and death do us part,’” Mr. Huang said on a podcast this year.
As chief financial officer, Ms. Kress was responsible for communicating with Nvidia’s investors and Wall Street. Over the past four years, Ms. Kress delivered a rosy message on quarterly earnings calls as Nvidia’s revenue and profits soared, though she also expressed concerns about the financial impact of American policies that restrict the sale of advanced chips to China.
In 2013, Nvidia’s revenue was $4.28 billion. Its revenue in its most recent fiscal year was more than 50 times that, at nearly $215.94 billion. In August, Ms. Kress told analysts and investors that Nvidia expects to grow 70 percent next year.
Ms. Kress has benefited from Nvidia’s skyrocketing stock price in recent years. As of March, she owned more than 4.4 million shares in the company, according to its most recent annual report, a stake that was worth about $780.4 million at the time. That makes Ms. Kress one of the largest individual shareholders of Nvidia. Its largest individual shareholder, with a 3.56 percent stake, is Mr. Huang.
Ms. Kress’s transition — as well as that of the permanent successor to Mr. Huang — could be complicated by how Mr. Huang managed Nvidia. He led the company with an executive team of more than 60 people who directly reported to him, many of whom are longtime loyalists. That flat structure will be difficult to unwind. On a podcast in January, Mr. Huang described his executive team as a group of “60 people who could be world-class C.E.O.s for many other companies.”
For the time being, Ms. Kress will be C.E.O. for Nvidia.
