WASHINGTON/SAN FRANCISCO, Nov 12 (Reuters) – Colette Kress spent years as the one Nvidia executive willing to check CEO Jensen Huang’s enormous, often risky ambitions. As he drove the chipmaker deeper into multibillion-dollar AI investments, she pushed back, according to two people familiar with the matter on Thursday.
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Through their conflicts, Kress served as an important counterweight to Huang, whose success afforded him great latitude on key decisions, the two sources said. Months before news that Huang had a relationship with a woman suspected of being a Chinese spy, some on Wall Street were questioning whether his appetite for risk was sound and if the deals he struck were feeding an increasingly circular AI economy.
Kress and her staff clashed with Huang and the company’s sales team over the massive and risky financing deals that fed into what some Wall Street critics deemed a circular AI economy, including investments in OpenAI and AI infrastructure companies such as Lambda, according to one of the people familiar with the matter.
A proposed $250 billion plan to support an OpenAI data center project in Ohio was ultimately pared to $120 billion.
“I think it’s unlikely anyone but Jensen is going to invest in his own customers as aggressively,” said a third source, a venture capital investor. Huang has pushed Nvidia to offer financing to startups, the person said.
KRESS THE PRAGMATIST
“Colette is a pragmatist,” said a fourth source familiar with the matter. She can project calm and help stabilize markets while the search is ongoing, the person said, adding that Kress had been on recent calls to reassure customers and suppliers as the tumult inside the company unfolded.
Under her leadership, Nvidia is likely to “approach DC more like other tech companies do, by trying to build capital and make friends,” instead of picking “a fight over export controls” the way it did under Huang’s leadership, the person said.
But many investors, analysts and industry sources who spoke to Reuters questioned whether a finance executive could preserve the technological risk-taking that turned Nvidia into an AI chips powerhouse.
“Putting (Kress) in the interim role makes sense to keep the markets calm, but I don’t think she is the long-term visionary that Nvidia needs to continue its current trajectory,” said Anshel Sag, principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy.
Nvidia shares slumped 14% to their lowest in nearly 16 months on Thursday after the company said Huang would step down, but pared losses to close down 4.3%.
WHAT DID KRESS KNOW?
A fifth source said Kress knew about his relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of healthcare, who reported to him. Nvidia and Powell did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Sunny Cheung, an analyst at the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation, said Kress could face congressional questions about the company’s oversight of chip sales involving Chinese military-linked institutions and Southeast Asian intermediaries.
In a 2023 interview with an Israeli publication, Kress credited her two young sons with urging her to join Nvidia in 2013 because they knew its chips from their video games.
She became a billionaire in 2025 based on the value of her Nvidia equity, according to media reports, and Forbes said her net worth of $1.2 billion in mid-2026 put her in 32nd place on its list of America’s richest self-made women.
Kress, who holds an undergraduate degree in finance and an MBA, was also named among the 50 most powerful women in business on rankings compiled by Fortune and Forbes magazines in recent years.
Reporting by Alexandra Alper in Washington, and Max Cherney, Deepa Seetharaman and Krystal Hu in San Francisco; Writing by Sayantani Ghosh; Editing by Cynthia Osterman
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Max A. Cherney is a correspondent for Reuters based in San Francisco, where he reports on the semiconductor industry and artificial intelligence. He joined Reuters in 2023 and has previously worked for Barron’s magazine and its sister publication, MarketWatch. Cherney graduated from Trent University with a degree in history.
Deepa is a Reuters technology correspondent covering artificial intelligence and the companies driving its development, including OpenAI and Anthropic. She reports on how advances in AI are reshaping business, politics, and society. This is Deepa’s second stint at Reuters. She began her career at the news agency in New York and covered the U.S. auto industry from Detroit before moving to San Francisco to report on Amazon. She was part of a Reuters team named a finalist for the Gerald Loeb Award for Beat Reporting for their coverage of the United Auto Workers. She rejoined Reuters in September 2025. In between, she spent a decade at The Wall Street Journal, where she was the lead reporter covering Facebook and later artificial intelligence following the emergence of ChatGPT. Her reporting included coverage of Instagram’s impact on teenage girls and investigations into how AI systems falter in moderating racist and hateful content. She has been part of teams that won the George Polk Award for Business Reporting and the Gerald Loeb Award for Beat Reporting.
Krystal reports on venture capital and startups for Reuters. She covers Silicon Valley and beyond through the lens of money and characters, with a focus on growth-stage startups, tech investments and AI. She has previously covered M&A for Reuters, breaking stories on Trump’s SPAC and Elon Musk’s Twitter financing. Previously, she reported on Amazon for Yahoo Finance, and her investigation of the company’s retail practice was cited by lawmakers in Congress. Krystal started a career in journalism by writing about tech and politics in China. She has a master’s degree from New York University, and enjoys a scoop of Matcha ice cream as much as getting a scoop at work.