Colette Kress

Colette Kress is an American business executive who has served as executive vice president and chief financial officer of Nvidia since September 2013 and, from 12 November 2026, as interim chief executive officer while keeping the finance post. Nvidia said she was 46 when it announced the 2013 appointment. A Forbes profile updated on 3 June 2026 listed her age as 59, her citizenship as the United States, and her residence as Saratoga, California. She holds a bachelor of science degree in finance from the University of Arizona and a master of business administration from Southern Methodist University.

Before Nvidia, she held finance positions at Texas Instruments, spent 13 years at Microsoft, including four years as chief financial officer of its Server and Tools division, and then three years as senior vice president and chief financial officer of Cisco's Business Technology and Operations Finance organization, covering financial strategy, planning, reporting, and business development for the company's segments, engineering, and operations. On 16 September 2013 Nvidia named her executive vice president and chief financial officer, effective later that month, reporting to president and chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang, after what the company called an extensive search, and it thanked Karen Burns for her work as interim chief financial officer. Forbes wrote that she joined after her two sons, who knew Nvidia from the chips in their video games, endorsed the move.

Fortune reported that Nvidia's annual revenue grew from $4.13 billion in fiscal 2014, the year she arrived, to $130.5 billion in fiscal 2025, and the company later reported fiscal 2026 revenue of $215.9 billion, up 65 percent from a year earlier. She was a regular presence beside Huang on earnings calls. Forbes put her net worth at $1.2 billion as of 3 June 2026 on its list of America's richest self-made women, attributing the wealth to Nvidia, and NBC News reported that Bloomberg's Billionaires Index had counted her in 2025 among Nvidia executives whose holdings pushed their net worth above $1 billion.

On 8 November 2026 the board said it was opening an independent investigation in light of reporting that Huang had been the target of a foreign intelligence effort, adding that it had no reason to believe U.S. national security or Nvidia secrets had been compromised. Four days later the board announced that Huang had resigned as president, chief executive, and a director, effective immediately, and that Kress would serve as interim chief executive while remaining executive vice president and chief financial officer until a permanent successor was chosen from internal and external candidates. Harvey C. Jones, described by the company as an entrepreneur and former chief executive and executive chairman of Synopsys, was named Nvidia's first board chair. NBC News reported that the resignation followed revelations of extramarital relationships, one with a woman described as an alleged Chinese spy and one with an employee who reported to Huang, and that the shares dipped that day. The company said fiscal 2027 third-quarter results would still be released on 17 November 2026. In the announcement Kress said she would build on the foundation Huang had created over 33 years and that the company's focus remained on customers, partners, developers, and shareholders.

Early life and education

What is publicly known

Nvidia's SEC filings identify her as Colette M. Kress and give her age on stated dates, but they do not record a birth date, a birthplace, or a middle name beyond the initial M. A Form 8-K on her appointment as chief financial officer described her, as of 11 September 2013, as 46. The Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended 25 January 2026 listed her age as 58 as of 20 February 2026, and a Form 8-K reporting the events of 11 November 2026 listed her as 59 when the board named her interim chief executive. A Forbes profile last updated 3 June 2026 also gave her age as 59 and her citizenship as the United States. Globes, in an interview published on 23 July 2023, described her as 56. Set side by side, those ages fit a birth in 1967 and do not fit a birth in 1966 or 1968, but no filing or profile states a month or day, and none is a birth record.

A funeral notice, rather than any account from Kress, is the published source that places her in a named family. Whitney & Murphy Funeral Home's obituary for Shirley Mae Hunter, of Paradise Valley, Arizona, who died on 25 May 2020, says Shirley was born in Chicago to Casimir and Estelle Zarzycki, met Fredrick Hunter there, and in 1969 moved with her family to Phoenix. It says she raised four daughters while working more than 28 years as a real-estate broker, names Colette (David) Kress as one of the daughters, and lists grandchildren including David Kress Jr. and Mathew Kress, the spelling used in the notice. The notice does not say when or where Colette was born, whether she was already born at the time of the 1969 move, or which schools she attended before university. Nvidia's Form 10-K biography omits parents, a hometown, and any schooling before college, and the Globes interview, which the paper called her first with Israeli media, discussed her work and her sons rather than her childhood.

Education

What the corporate record does fix is two degrees, in wording that is essentially unchanged from the 2013 appointment through the fiscal 2026 Form 10-K: a B.S. in finance from the University of Arizona and an M.B.A. from Southern Methodist University. Neither document dates the Arizona degree, names a college or department within the university, or lists honors, a thesis, or any other credential. The Cox School of Business in Dallas has supplied the detail the filings leave out. On 12 November 2026 the school identified Kress as an SMU Cox alumna of 1996 who earned a Professional M.B.A. in its part-time program while she was working full time, and it said her undergraduate degree was from the University of Arizona. That release does not date the bachelor's degree. A Tucson news report the same day likewise described her as a University of Arizona graduate with an M.B.A. from Southern Methodist University, without a class year for the first degree or any pre-college biography.

Career before Nvidia

Before joining Nvidia in 2013, Colette Kress worked in finance at three large technology companies. The most contemporaneous public account is Nvidia’s current report of September 16, 2013, filed after the board appointed her executive vice president and chief financial officer: she had spent eight years at Texas Instruments in a variety of finance positions; she held positions at Microsoft from 1997 to 2010, including, beginning in 2006, chief financial officer of the Server and Tools division; and since 2010 she had been senior vice president and chief financial officer of the Business Technology and Operations Finance organization at Cisco. Nvidia’s announcement the same day described the Microsoft assignment as four years and the Cisco assignment as three, and said she also held senior Microsoft roles in corporate planning and finance. Those documents do not list her Texas Instruments titles, and she was not corporate chief financial officer at Microsoft or Cisco. GeekWire later found one Seattle-area mention from the Microsoft years, a 2007 seminar listing, and reported that her LinkedIn profile dated a corporate vice president title from April 2006 to November 2010.

Texas Instruments

Texas Instruments, based in Dallas, spent the late 1980s and 1990s narrowing a diversified electronics company toward semiconductors. By December 1998 the Los Angeles Times reported that, under chief executive Thomas Engibous, the company had sold its defense-electronics business to Raytheon and, that summer, its unprofitable memory-chip line to Micron Technology, and was concentrating on digital signal processors—chips then used in products such as digital phones, cameras, and modems. The paper called DSP a roughly $3.3 billion business in which Texas Instruments then held about 45 percent of the market, and quoted Merrill Lynch analyst Thomas Kurlak that pure DSP chips were only about 20 percent of revenue, with analog chips a larger line then facing weak demand. Bill Aylesworth, not Kress, was the chief financial officer in that account.

The 2013 filing says only that she spent eight years at Texas Instruments in a variety of finance positions. Continuous service until 1997 would put the start in the late 1980s, but the filing gives no start date and no finance-group assignment. The defense and memory sales describe the company around her years there; they are not documented as transactions she ran.

Microsoft

At Microsoft she moved from corporate planning and finance into the finance leadership of Server and Tools, a business that sold software and services to companies running their own data centers and, late in her tenure, early cloud services. In the fiscal 2007 Form 10-K—the first full year after the 2006 start date Nvidia later cited—Server and Tools reported $11.182 billion of revenue and $3.837 billion of operating income, compared with $9.680 billion and $3.171 billion in fiscal 2006. The segment note listed Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server, Visual Studio, System Center, security and integration servers, developer subscriptions, enterprise services, and product support.

Microsoft’s fiscal 2010 business description, the year she left, listed Windows Server, Windows Azure, SQL Server, SQL Azure, Visual Studio, System Center, BizTalk Server, consulting, and Premier product support. Products could run on a customer’s premises, at a partner, or in a Microsoft-hosted environment. About half of segment revenue came from annuity volume licenses, about 30 percent from transactional, retail, and PC-maker licenses, and the rest from Enterprise Services. In the segment note, revenue was $14.878 billion in fiscal 2010, $14.276 billion in fiscal 2009, and $13.217 billion in fiscal 2008, with operating income of $4.990 billion, $4.638 billion, and $3.845 billion. Management attributed the fiscal 2010 increase mainly to product revenue, up $652 million, or 6 percent, led by Windows Server, SQL Server, and enterprise client-access suites and partly offset by lower developer-tools revenue; Premier support grew while consulting fell. Server operating systems competed with Unix from Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Oracle, and with Linux.

The job was divisional. In the fiscal 2010 list of executive officers, Bob Muglia was president of Server and Tools, Peter Klein was Microsoft’s chief financial officer, and Steve Ballmer was chief executive. Nvidia later summarized Kress’s responsibility as financial strategy, planning, reporting, and business development for the division. GeekWire, citing the LinkedIn dates, placed her departure in November 2010 and noted that Satya Nadella took over Server and Tools in 2011, after she had left.

Cisco

From 2010 until 2013 she was senior vice president and chief financial officer of Cisco’s Business Technology and Operations Finance organization, responsible, in Nvidia’s description, for financial strategy, planning, reporting, and business development across business segments, engineering, and operations. That was not the company-wide finance seat. Cisco named Frank Calderoni executive vice president and chief financial officer in 2008, and its August 2010 earnings release still identified him as CFO.

Nvidia’s filing described Cisco as a networking-equipment company. For the fiscal year ended July 31, 2010, Cisco reported net sales of $40.0 billion. Fiscal 2012 net sales were $46.1 billion, up from $43.2 billion in fiscal 2011, and GAAP net income was $8.0 billion. Chairman and chief executive John T. Chambers described the strategy as intelligent networks and technology architectures of products, services, and software, amid shifts he called cloud, mobile, visual, virtual, and social.

During her time in the operations-finance organization, Cisco was cutting cost and simplifying how it was run. On July 18, 2011, the company gave details of a plan to simplify the organization, refine operations, and reduce annual operating expenses by $1 billion. The plan included cutting about 6,500 jobs, about 9 percent of the regular full-time workforce, including about 2,100 people who took early retirement, and a separate sale of a set-top-box factory in Juárez, Mexico, to Foxconn, with about 5,000 employees expected to transfer. Those announcements do not assign her a role in designing the plan. She stayed in the post until 2013, when she left for Nvidia.

Chief financial officer of Nvidia

The 2013 appointment

Colette Kress became executive vice president and chief financial officer of Nvidia in September 2013, filling a post open since early 2011. On March 15, 2011, the Santa Clara, California, company said David White had resigned as chief financial officer for personal reasons and would remain an employee through May 31. Karen Burns, corporate controller and vice president of tax, became interim chief financial officer; she had run Nvidia’s tax department for about a decade after nine years at KPMG. Reuters described Kress’s hiring as the end of a search of more than two years. It reported that a spokesman said Nvidia had waited for what it considered the right fit while Burns served in the interim, and that analysts did not expect a major strategy change. Nvidia was then pushing into tablets and smartphones as its personal-computer graphics business came under pressure.

The board appointed her on September 11, 2013, contingent on a start later that month, and Nvidia announced the hire on September 16. She was 46, and in the new post she was also principal financial officer. Burns returned to vice president, corporate controller, and tax. The release called her a 24-year technology-industry veteran who would report to president and chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang, and quoted him thanking Burns and saying the company had “searched extensively for the right candidate.” An offer dated September 3, which she signed on September 13, placed her in the Santa Clara office reporting to Jensen Huang, listed September 30, 2013, as the anticipated start, and made employment at will.

The same filing summarized the jobs she was leaving. Since 2010 she had been senior vice president and chief financial officer of Cisco’s Business Technology and Operations Finance organization, responsible for financial strategy, planning, reporting, and business development across segments, engineering, and operations. From 1997 to 2010 she held finance posts at Microsoft, including, from 2006, chief financial officer of the Server and Tools division, after eight years in finance at Texas Instruments. She held a bachelor’s degree in finance from the University of Arizona and an MBA from Southern Methodist University. Pay in the offer was a $500,000 salary, incentive compensation targeted at $550,000, a $1.5 million sign-on bonus and a $1 million first-anniversary bonus, each with a repayment clause if she left within a defined year other than in a reduction in force, and a recommended grant of 220,000 restricted stock units vesting over about four years.

Forbes later wrote that she joined reportedly after her two sons, who knew Nvidia from chips in video games they played, endorsed the move. In a July 2023 interview with the Israeli newspaper Globes, Kress said the boys, then eight and ten, had “advised” her to take a job at a company that, for gamers, was “the Holy Grail.”

Responsibilities and public role

As chief financial officer she was the executive who laid out the quarter for investors: revenue, margins, spending, the outlook, cash, and capital returns, then questions. On her first earnings call, November 7, 2013, for the third quarter of fiscal 2014, she reported revenue of $1.054 billion, margins and expenses, a fourth-quarter revenue outlook of about $1.05 billion, a higher dividend, and more repurchase authority. Huang spoke on the business; she spoke on the figures and the guide. That division lasted for the rest of this period. CNBC, looking back before November 2026, called her the other main voice on those calls. On the May 22, 2024, call, Fortune noted, she stated quarterly revenue of $26 billion.

She also appeared at broker conferences without delivering a product keynote. On June 28, 2023, after The Wall Street Journal reported that Washington was considering tighter limits on artificial-intelligence chip exports to China, she told a conference that further controls on the A800 and H800 were not expected, if adopted, to have an immediate material effect, because demand elsewhere was strong. She said China was 20 to 25 percent of data-center revenue, which she put at $4.28 billion in the prior quarter, and that a lasting ban on data-center sales there would cost U.S. industry an opportunity. The shares, which had begun to recover on the remarks, finished about 1.8 percent lower. At a UBS technology conference in December 2024, Reuters reported, she discussed uses of the company’s cash, including “bringing on great teams in some M&A form.”

At Nvidia GTC, her set piece was the analyst session, not the main keynote. A transcript of the March 2024 in-person session records her taking questions with Huang and telling analysts that Blackwell products were expected later that year, with customers already signaling demand. In a 2022 interview later quoted by Fortune, she described the finance job as keeping processes usable as the company grew. Nvidia, she said, had been the smallest company she had worked for, and the growth rate pushed finance and neighboring groups to replace manual work with digital systems.

Working with the chief executive

She reported to Huang from the 2013 offer until the end of this period. Globes reported that he recruited her himself and, on a whiteboard, sketched a company that would supply computing to firms building artificial-intelligence systems. She said that even before she joined he had argued graphics processors could train computers for tasks beyond drawing images, and that she tried not to treat the stock price as the point of the job.

In public he was the executive most associated with product announcements, and she was the one investors heard on the accounts. Fortune wrote in August 2024 that analysts assigned a substantial part of Nvidia’s standing with Wall Street to her. Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities told Fortune that her work as chief financial officer had been “instrumental in Nvidia’s success with Wall Street, and is key to Jensen’s vision,” and that she was well regarded inside the company and in the industry. Speaking to CNBC about those years, Ives said Huang “didn’t do anything without her” and described her as involved with customers, partners, and technology, “more than just a CFO.” A Form 8-K filed on November 12, 2026, said the board had appointed her interim chief executive while it searched for a permanent successor, and that she would keep the finance office during that search.

Finance through Nvidia's expansion

Reported results and the balance sheet

As chief financial officer, Colette Kress presented Nvidia's quarterly results through a long rise in sales and two slower years. In fiscal 2014, the year she took the role, the company reported full-year revenue of $4.13 billion. Annual revenue was $11.72 billion in fiscal 2019 and then fell 7 percent, to $10.92 billion, in fiscal 2020. Fiscal 2023 revenue was $26.97 billion, flat with the year before: data-center revenue rose 41 percent to $15.01 billion, gaming revenue fell 27 percent to $9.07 billion, and Nvidia returned $10.44 billion to shareholders through repurchases and dividends.

The results she reported after that were of a different size. Fiscal 2024 revenue was $60.9 billion. Fiscal 2025 revenue was $130.5 billion, up 114 percent, with GAAP net income of $72.9 billion. Fiscal 2026 revenue was $215.9 billion, up 65 percent, GAAP net income was $120.1 billion, and data-center revenue was $193.7 billion. GAAP gross margin was 75.0 percent for fiscal 2025 and 71.1 percent for fiscal 2026, the latter year including the China-related charge described below.

Cash accumulated alongside inventories and private stakes. Cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities were $43.2 billion at the end of fiscal 2025 and $62.6 billion a year later, while inventories rose from $10.1 billion to $21.4 billion and non-marketable equity securities from $3.4 billion to $22.3 billion. For the first quarter of fiscal 2026 she reported operating cash flow of $27.4 billion and said large cloud providers accounted for just under half of data-center revenue. At that quarter-end she also listed $29.8 billion of purchase commitments and obligations for inventory and manufacturing capacity, and $13.7 billion of other purchase obligations, including $10.6 billion of multi-year cloud-service agreements meant to support research and development and DGX Cloud.

Export controls, China, and demand

Licensing rules set by the United States repeatedly changed what Nvidia could ship to China. On the November 21, 2023 earnings call, Kress said new controls required licenses for products including the Hopper and Ampere 100 and 800 series for China and other markets, and that sales to China and other affected destinations from products then subject to licensing had "consistently contributed approximately 20% to 25% of data center revenue over the past few quarters." She said those sales were expected to "decline significantly" in the next quarter, that growth elsewhere was expected to more than offset the drop in the near term, and that Nvidia did not have good visibility into the magnitude of the impact even over the long term.

The company later offered H20, which Kress, on May 28, 2025, called a data-center GPU "designed specifically for the China market" that "does not have a market outside of China," and which Nvidia had sold with the prior administration's approval. She said that on April 9, 2025 the U.S. government required a license for H20 exports to China and provided no grace period to sell existing inventory. Nvidia recognized $4.6 billion of H20 revenue from sales before that date, could not ship an additional $2.5 billion in the quarter, and took a $4.5 billion charge for excess H20 inventory and purchase obligations—lower than first expected, she said, because some materials could be reused. GAAP gross margin for the quarter was 60.5 percent; excluding the charge, non-GAAP gross margin would have been 71.3 percent.

Kress said, "Losing access to the China AI accelerator market, which we believe will grow to nearly $50 billion, would have a material adverse impact on our business going forward and benefit our foreign competitors in China and worldwide." The outlook she gave was revenue of about $45 billion and already reflected an estimated $8 billion loss of H20 sales. On the same call, chief executive Jensen Huang said the China market was "effectively closed to US industry" and that Hopper could not be cut further to comply. A comparable limit hit another U.S. supplier: Advanced Micro Devices said on April 15, 2025 that a new license rule covered its MI308 products and that it expected charges of up to about $800 million for inventory, purchase commitments, and related reserves, with no assurance licenses would be granted. When Nvidia published fiscal 2026 results in February 2026, the next quarter's outlook still assumed no data-center compute revenue from China.

Investments, buybacks, and customer commitments

Not every large transaction in this period closed. Nvidia completed its purchase of Mellanox Technologies on April 27, 2020, for approximately $7 billion. An agreement dated September 13, 2020, under which Nvidia would acquire Arm from SoftBank Group, was terminated on February 8, 2022 because of regulatory challenges; the sellers kept a $1.25 billion prepayment, and Nvidia kept a 20-year Arm license.

Repurchases then absorbed a larger share of cash. In the quarter ended July 30, 2023, Nvidia reported revenue of $13.51 billion and returned $3.38 billion to shareholders, and on August 21, 2023 the board added $25 billion of repurchase authority with no expiration date. During fiscal 2026 the company repurchased $40.4 billion of common stock, paid $974 million of cash dividends, and still had $58.5 billion of repurchase authorization remaining.

Kress separately described a proposed investment that was still unsigned. In September 2025 Nvidia and OpenAI outlined a plan to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems, with Nvidia investing up to $100 billion as that capacity came online. At a UBS conference in Scottsdale on December 2, 2025, she said, "We still haven't completed a definitive agreement." Fortune reported that the September outline had lifted Nvidia's shares by about 4 percent, that Huang had called the project the biggest AI infrastructure project in history, and that analysts had estimated it could bring as much as $500 billion of revenue—amounts that preceded a definitive contract. The same account quoted Nvidia's filing that there was "no assurance that any investment will be completed on expected terms, if at all," and said that caution also covered a planned $10 billion investment in Anthropic and a $5 billion commitment to Intel.

Demand statements and supply contracts sat side by side with that uncertainty. On the May 2025 call Kress said customers' commitments were firm, in the same remarks in which she described the H20 write-down. Coverage of the later filing said Nvidia warned that it often ordered graphics processors, memory, and networking gear more than a year ahead, frequently under non-cancelable prepaid contracts, and that if customers scaled back, delayed financing, or changed plans the company could be left with excess inventory, cancellation penalties, or impairments—the kind of mismatch it said had significantly harmed results in the past.

Compensation, ownership, and wealth

Pay disclosed to shareholders

Nvidia's definitive proxy for the June 24, 2026 annual meeting, dated May 12, 2026, reports Colette M. Kress's pay as executive vice president and chief financial officer. For fiscal 2026, ended January 25, 2026, the summary compensation table lists salary of $898,577, stock awards of $12,825,872, non-equity incentive pay of $600,000, and other compensation of $16,402, totaling $14,340,850. The same table lists $21,362,532 for fiscal 2025, of which $19,849,891 was stock awards, and $13,266,792 for fiscal 2024, of which $11,756,027 was stock awards; the incentive column was $600,000 in both years. The stock-award column is not cash. It is the ASC 718 grant-date fair value of restricted stock units and performance stock units, and for the performance units it assumes base-plan performance rather than the stretch outcome.

The compensation committee set her fiscal 2026 target at $16 million, up $1 million, or 7 percent, from the year before, all of it in equity. Cash targets were unchanged: a $900,000 salary and a $300,000 variable-cash target, which paid at 200 percent, the $600,000 in the table, after revenue passed the stretch goal. Target equity of $14.8 million was split among time-based units ($7,400,386, or 57,106 shares, vesting over four years), annual units tied to non-GAAP operating income ($3,699,807), and three-year units tied to total shareholder return versus the S&P 500 ($3,699,807). Operating income above the stretch goal made 57,100 shares from the fiscal 2026 annual grant eligible to vest, and three-year relative return at stretch did the same for 49,560 shares from the fiscal 2024 grant. In the same table, the other non-chief-executive named officers had fiscal 2026 totals of about $14.3 million to $14.8 million, while Jensen Huang's total was $36,343,830.

In fiscal 2026, 442,087 of her shares vested, a gross value of $63,881,560 at Nasdaq prices on the vesting dates, before tax withholding—separate from the accounting value of new grants. The $16,402 of other pay was an $11,500 401(k) match and $4,902 of imputed life-insurance income, benefits available to eligible employees; the company reported no other perquisites for the named executives that year.

Holdings and planned sales

As of March 23, 2026, the proxy lists 4,443,523 shares beneficially owned by Kress, under 1 percent of 24,312,141,810 shares outstanding, and none issuable within 60 days. A footnote places 4,010,630 of them outside her own name: 4,000 shares for each of two immediate family members; 712,934 in a limited liability company whose sole member is an irrevocable trust with an independent institutional trustee; 83,060 in a trust of which she is trustee; and four grantor retained annuity trusts—451,498 shares in a trust she trustees, 451,498 in one her husband trustees with sole voting and investment power, and 2,032,048 and 271,592 in two trusts they trustee together.

A Form 4 filed September 18, 2026 reports 765,103 shares held directly and those same indirect balances, 4,775,733 shares in all. The two disclosures are not the same measure: Nvidia's Form 4s add to the direct line when restricted units and earned performance shares are reported as acquired, including awards that vest later, and the count then changes with vesting, gifts, tax withholding, and sales. On December 17, 2025 she reported a gift of 113,182 shares for no consideration; that filing lists 271,592 shares in the fourth annuity trust. Separately, the proxy valued 569,889 unvested restricted and performance units at $106,951,069, using the January 23, 2026 close of $187.67 and base-case assumptions where performance was still uncertified.

Open-market sales have been reported under Rule 10b5-1 plans. The rule's affirmative defense covers trades under a written plan, adopted in good faith when the person was not aware of material nonpublic information, that fixes amount, price, and date or uses a formula; 2022 amendments added cooling-off periods and an officer certification of those conditions. Form 4s for November 3, 2025 and March 20, 2026 say the sales followed a plan adopted March 4, 2025, with the March sales taken from her direct account, the trust, and the LLC. The fiscal 2026 Form 10-K separately disclosed a plan she adopted on December 18, 2025 to sell 500,000 shares through March 23, 2027. The quarterly report for the period ended April 26, 2026 says that plan was terminated on April 10, 2026 with no shares sold. The report for the quarter ended July 26, 2026 says that on June 16, 2026 she adopted a plan for up to 375,439 shares from future vesting, assuming maximum performance where not yet certified, with sales net of tax withholding, expiring December 14, 2027. Under that plan, the September Form 4 reports a sale of 34,918 shares on September 17 at weighted-average prices from $218.0144 to $219.5932, about $7.6 million, after 40,747 shares were withheld the day before at $212.17 for taxes on vesting.

Billionaire estimates

Forbes ranks Kress No. 32 on its 2026 list of America's Richest Self-Made Women and puts her net worth at $1.2 billion as of June 3, 2026. The profile updated that morning gives her age as 59, the source of wealth as "Nvidia, Self Made," a self-made score of 6, residence in Saratoga, California, United States citizenship, and two children. Forbes has described a score of 6 as a hired hand who did not found the business. That year's list was the first edition limited to fortunes of at least $1 billion, and the introduction named Nvidia's chief financial officer among the new billionaires, connecting the fortune to the artificial-intelligence boom.

That $1.2 billion is a stock-price estimate for June 3, 2026, not the March beneficial-ownership count times a price Forbes discloses, and it moves when Nvidia's shares move. The profile is not a running tally of later vesting, the December gift, tax withholding, or Rule 10b5-1 sales. Neither the proxy total nor the larger Form 4 total is a personal balance sheet: they treat unvested awards differently, and they do not itemize tax, cash already diversified out of the stock, or debt.

Interim chief executive

Events preceding the resignation

On November 8, 2026, the board of Nvidia said it was opening an independent investigation “in light of recent reporting” that founder and chief executive Jensen Huang had been the target of a foreign intelligence effort. A committee of independent directors, with outside counsel, would oversee the inquiry. The board said U.S. national and economic security was paramount, that it had no reason to believe national security or Nvidia secrets had been compromised, and that it still had confidence in Huang, who it said would cooperate.

The reporting concerned Alice Huang, who is not related to Jensen Huang and who had been an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based data-center company and Nvidia customer. The BBC and The Guardian, citing The New York Times, reported that U.S. officials suspected she had acted for Chinese intelligence; CNN reported the same suspicion. China’s Foreign Ministry called the allegations groundless and a smear. CNN and CNBC reported that the Financial Times described U.S. officials as believing the relationship was romantic. The Guardian reported that the two had been photographed together at events in Taipei in 2024 and 2025, and that Nvidia had earlier said its own review of Megaspeed found no cause for concern. The BBC reported that it remained unclear what information she was alleged to have passed to Beijing. It also quoted Attorney General Todd Blanche as saying on November 12 that the United States Department of Justice had not concluded whether she had engaged in espionage.

Huang emailed employees the same day that he had been unfaithful to his wife, that the conduct had hurt her and their children, and that he accepted responsibility. He did not name the other person. He apologized to colleagues, the board, partners, and shareholders, said he would cooperate with the investigation of the “national security concerns raised in news reports,” and wrote that he was committed to Nvidia and to U.S. national security. The BBC reported that President Donald Trump called Huang a “fine person” and an “honourable guy” who had done “an amazing job,” and said he did not think he should have acted earlier on intelligence briefings described by the Times.

On November 10, the independent directors said they had retained Joon H. Kim, a former acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to conduct the investigation announced that Sunday.

Further allegations appeared on November 11. CNBC reported that the Times had described another extramarital relationship, with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of health care, who reported to Huang, and that Reuters had separately described an “intimate relationship” with a second, unnamed Nvidia employee. The BBC, citing U.S. media, also named Powell and quoted employees who said the two had seemed unusually close; it reported that reaction inside the company had been more muted until the account involving a direct report. CNN reported that the board met that Wednesday night to consider removing Huang, a change from Sunday’s expression of confidence. Lawmakers had already asked for testimony. The BBC reported that Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chris Coons, with Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, had sought a briefing of Congress. CNBC reported that Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott had requested that Huang appear and had warned that the committee could use subpoenas.

Appointment and mandate

In a Form 8-K, Nvidia said the board on November 11 accepted the resignation of Jen-Hsun Huang as president, chief executive, and director, effective immediately, and appointed Colette M. Kress, 59, interim chief executive while it searched for a successor. She had been executive vice president and chief financial officer since 2013 and would keep that office. The company announced the changes on November 12 from Santa Clara, California and said the search would consider internal and external candidates. Kress signed the 8-K, filed that day, as interim chief executive, executive vice president, and chief financial officer.

The board also named Harvey C. Jones, 73, its first chair. The filing said he had been a director since 1993 and managing partner of Square Wave Ventures, a private family office, since 2004. The company described him as a technology executive and venture investor who had been chief executive and executive chairman of Synopsys. It said Kress had led the finance organization through Nvidia’s growth and that, before joining in September 2013, she had spent nearly 25 years in finance at technology companies including Cisco and Microsoft.

Jones said the board had “full confidence” in Kress and the leadership team and expected operations, customer commitments, and the product roadmap to continue without interruption. Kress said she would build on the foundation Huang had created over 33 years and keep the focus on customers, partners, developers, and shareholders. The board thanked Huang. The announcement did not publish findings from the November 8 review. In emails CNBC said it obtained, Jones told staff that Kress had been “a key architect of NVIDIA’s growth and capital strategy” and that the search would look inside and outside the company. Kress called the period “extraordinarily difficult,” thanked employees for their “resilience,” and set a company meeting for November 18 at 9 a.m. Pacific Time. The BBC reported that she also called an emergency meeting of her executive team.

Nvidia said third-quarter results for fiscal 2027 remained scheduled for Tuesday, November 17, at about 1:20 p.m. Pacific Time, with the earnings call at 2 p.m. Those results had not been released as of November 13.

Market reaction and succession

Nasdaq-listed shares fell as much as 14% on November 12 and closed down 4.34%, CNBC reported. The stock spent much of the session under a $4 trillion market capitalization before finishing above that level, which CNBC said it had closed above since July 2025. CNN reported a premarket decline of more than 10%. The BBC said the company had lost $550 billion of market value in five days, its largest five-day decline since going public, and that the shares were down 31% from a peak a few weeks earlier. It put Nvidia at about 7% of the S&P 500. TechCrunch reported a drop of nearly 12% early on November 12 and said that, from the prior Friday, the stock had at one point fallen as much as 19%, erasing more than $855 billion of market value.

CNBC reported that Bernstein cut its price target from $400 to $200, and quoted analyst Stacy Rasgon as saying an alleged affair with a direct report made it “much tougher for the board to leave him in position” and that the next person to set strategy was not obvious. TechCrunch reported that Huang held no supervoting shares, put his stake at about 3.5%, and said Nvidia had not designated a successor. The mandate given to Kress was interim. The 8-K and the November 12 release left the search open to internal and external candidates and kept her in the finance role while she held the chief executive’s office.

Recognition and personal life

Rankings and awards

Fortune included Colette Kress on its list of the 100 Most Powerful Women in business in 2024, 2025, and 2026. In 2024, the first year she appeared, the magazine ranked her No. 16 and grouped her with Microsoft chief financial officer Amy Hood among newcomers at companies central to generative artificial intelligence. Fortune's profile said she had been Nvidia's finance chief since 2013, that analysts regarded her as instrumental to the company's standing on Wall Street and as a strategic partner to chief executive Jensen Huang, and that fiscal 2024 revenue was $60.9 billion, up 126 percent from the year before. In its account of that year's list, Fortune said it gives an edge to chief executives when it ranks the group, while treating chief financial officers as holding a distinct kind of influence inside the companies they help run.

The 2025 ranking placed her at No. 44. Fortune wrote that she was managing financial risks and opportunities as Nvidia increased production of Blackwell graphics processors, that she had become chief financial officer in September 2013 after senior finance roles at Cisco and Microsoft, and that during her tenure the company's market capitalization had reached a high of almost $3.5 trillion and was then near $3 trillion. The same profile reported fiscal 2025 revenue of $130.5 billion, against $60.9 billion the previous year.

On the 2026 list she was No. 49. An article dated 27 May 2026 counted 11 finance chiefs among the 100 and listed Kress, with the title executive vice president and chief financial officer, at that number. Fortune's profile called her the financial steward of a business with $216 billion in revenue, responsible for turning Huang's plans into guidance for investors, and said she had framed spending on artificial-intelligence infrastructure as a structural shift in computing rather than a bubble.

Forbes ranked her No. 37 on its 2025 list of the World's Most Powerful Women. The entry gives her titles as chief financial officer and executive vice president and says she helped oversee one of the largest revenue increases in technology: Nvidia recorded $130.5 billion in its 2025 fiscal year, more than double the year before. It says she was named to the job in 2013 after senior finance roles at Cisco and Microsoft.

Forbes' 2026 ranking of America's richest self-made women was its first edition limited to fortunes of at least $1 billion. The magazine counted 43 women, up from 38 billionaires a year earlier, and named Nvidia's chief financial officer among the new billionaires, tying the fortune to the artificial-intelligence boom. She tied for No. 32, at an estimated $1.2 billion, the same figure a Forbes profile updated 3 June 2026 gave as her net worth that day. The profile also lists a self-made score of 6 and gives Nvidia as the source of wealth.

Family and residence

That profile lists her residence as Saratoga, California, her citizenship as the United States, and two children. It says she joined Nvidia in 2013, reportedly after her two sons, who knew the company because of the chips in video games they played, endorsed the move. It also gives her age as 59.

A 5 May 2023 University of Florida article by senior writer Chris Harry, about her son Matthew Kress, identifies David Kress as Matthew's father and says David met his future wife while working in Silicon Valley. The article says David started in the mailroom at Microsoft in 1987 and retired after three decades as senior business operations manager of worldwide enterprise marketing. It describes Matthew as a walk-on from Saratoga, names an older brother, David Jr., and says the brothers played basketball and baseball growing up, with Matthew attending Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose before golf became his sport. Colette Kress is quoted on supporting that attempt to play college golf and on not discussing his walk-on status at home. A family photograph in the article is captioned with Colette, Matthew, David, and David Jr.

On 9 February 2020, Drew Altizer Photography identified Colette Kress and David Kress together at the Montalvo Arts Center's One Enchanted Evening gala.