Colette Kress helped put Israel at the heart of Nvidia’s AI business. Now she’s in

For more than a decade, Colette Kress has held one of the most important positions at Nvidia without becoming one of its most visible public figures. As CFO, she helped transform the company’s technology ambitions into one of the most extraordinary financial successes in the company’s history. Behind the scenes, she also served as a counterbalance to CEO Jensen Huang, sometimes questioning his appetite for risk as he pushed Nvidia toward increasingly ambitious investments.

Now, following Huang’s departure after three decades at the helm, the 59-year-old executive has been named interim CEO as Nvidia searches for a permanent successor. His appointment puts one of the company’s longest-serving executives in charge at a time of considerable uncertainty, with questions surrounding Huang’s departure, Nvidia’s increasingly complex investment strategy and the sustainability of the AI ​​boom.

According to people familiar with the matter cited by Reuters, Kress and his team clashed with Huang and Nvidia’s sales organization over some of the company’s significant financial commitments, including investments in OpenAI and AI infrastructure companies such as Lambda. The concern was that Nvidia was taking substantial risks by funding companies that were also its customers, potentially contributing to an increasingly circular AI economy.

A proposed $250 billion plan to support an OpenAI data center project in Ohio was ultimately reduced to $120 billion. Kress’s willingness to challenge Huang’s plans would have made her an important counterweight to a founder whose extraordinary success had given him considerable freedom in making major strategic decisions.

Those who know her describe Kress as a pragmatist with a measured, calming style, in contrast to Huang’s more confrontational approach. Her experience and knowledge of Nvidia’s financial operations make her a natural choice to stabilize the company during the transition. She has already participated in calls with customers and suppliers aimed at reassuring them in this disrupted context.

But whether she can permanently replace Huang is another question. Although his financial expertise and understanding of the business are widely recognized, some investors and analysts doubt whether a finance executive can maintain the technological ambition and willingness to take risks that have made Nvidia the central player in the AI ​​revolution.

Kress joined Nvidia in 2013, after a career spanning more than three decades in the technology industry. She previously held senior financial positions at companies including Microsoft, Cisco and Texas Instruments, and served as senior vice president and chief financial officer in Cisco’s business technology and operations finance organization.

Huang personally recruited her, laying out his vision for Nvidia as a company that would provide both the computing power and underlying infrastructure for the next generation of technology. At the time, Nvidia was primarily known for its graphics processors, which were widely used in gaming computers. Huang believed that these same processors could eventually power much more complex computing tasks, including artificial intelligence.

Kress was initially hesitant to join the company. Her two sons, then aged eight and ten, knew about Nvidia through its gaming products and encouraged her to pursue the opportunity. She eventually joined the company, serving as part of the leadership team that would oversee the company’s transformation from a graphics chip maker to a dominant provider of AI computing infrastructure.

His arrival coincided with a period when Nvidia was still far from its current position. One of the first advances to validate Huang’s vision came in 2012, when researchers at the University of Toronto used Nvidia GPUs to train neural networks. The emergence of ChatGPT a decade later created another turning point, unleashing demand for the computing power that Nvidia had spent years developing.

Kress has repeatedly emphasized that Nvidia’s business is not just about selling chips. Its competitive advantage lies in combining hardware with software, development tools and a broader computing platform. This strategy has helped the company establish a position that its competitors have struggled to replicate.

A key figure in Nvidia’s Israeli expansion

Kress also has a particularly close connection to Nvidia’s Israeli operations, which became strategically important to the company following its $6.9 billion acquisition of Mellanox Technologies in 2020.

The acquisition was the result of fierce competition with Intel and gave Nvidia control of a leading Israeli networking technology company. This allowed Nvidia to combine its GPUs with high-performance networking equipment, allowing it to offer more complete data center systems rather than individual components.

Kress was a strong supporter of the acquisition, which she considered one of the most successful transactions she had seen in the technology industry. She explained that the combination of Nvidia’s computing capabilities and Mellanox’s networking technology has allowed the company to build nearly complete data centers for its customers.

The deal also transformed Nvidia’s presence in Israel. Following the acquisition, approximately 3,200 employees, or approximately 12% of Nvidia’s global workforce at the time, were based in the country.

Kress maintained unusually close contact with the Israeli operation. She described Israel as an integral part of her daily schedule, with meetings involving local leaders usually taking place at the start of her work day, before moving to California. His involvement reflects the importance of the Israeli company to Nvidia’s global strategy, particularly in network and data center infrastructure.

The acquisition has become even more important as the AI ​​boom has increased demand for technology that connects thousands of processors within increasingly powerful data centers. Mellanox’s networking capabilities now form a core part of Nvidia’s broader AI infrastructure offering.