Colette Kress has been Nvidia's interim chief executive for barely a day, and the story everyone is reading about her this morning concerns what her predecessor reportedly said in private.
Jensen Huang described Kress as "a deer in the headlights" during an August meeting with Nvidia's senior finance team, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing a person familiar with the comments. According to the paper, he interrupted her presentation and called her a "reporting CFO," rather than someone who could help set strategy.
The remark came about three months before Huang's exit. He resigned as president, chief executive and director "effective immediately" on Thursday, with no continuing role, days after admitting an extramarital affair, Nvidia said. Kress, 59, took the top job on an interim basis and keeps the CFO role. There is no public response to the report from Nvidia, Kress or Huang by the time of writing.
What the Journal says happened
As the Journal tells it, the meeting was about money Nvidia was putting behind its own customers. The company was discussing billions of dollars of guarantees for cloud providers and data-centre developers that could not easily pay for its chips, and Huang had started to doubt whether his dealmaking had gone too far. Kress, the paper reports, had been asking how such deals should be picked, valued and judged on returns. People familiar with the talks told the Journal she reworked a proposed backstop for an OpenAI data-centre project, halving Nvidia's initial commitment before a smaller deal was signed on 17 August.
The account rests on unnamed sources, and the quote itself on one person. It is one side of a private exchange, and neither Kress nor Huang has offered theirs.
A founder's verdict, or a CFO's caution?
The story cuts both ways for Kress. It is unflattering. The man who ran Nvidia for 33 years reportedly did not rate her as a strategist, and that matters while the board decides whether she is a caretaker or a contender. Nvidia has said it will consider internal and external candidates, and it has not given a timetable.
Yet the same reporting casts Kress as the executive who questioned the riskiest part of Huang's playbook, using Nvidia's balance sheet to fund demand for its own chips, well before the scandal. Publicly, she defended those deals, the Journal noted. For shareholders worried about that exposure, a finance chief who pushed back on the founder may read better than the headline suggests.
Why the timing hurts
Kress presents Nvidia's results for the third quarter of fiscal 2027 on 17 November, with the call at 2pm PT (10pm GMT). It will be her first report as interim chief executive. In August, Nvidia guided revenue of $108bn, plus or minus 2%. LSEG consensus is about $109.2bn, according to IG. Kress set that guidance as CFO. On Tuesday she must stand behind it as chief executive, in front of analysts who will have read the Journal.
The report also sits awkwardly with the continuity message. In Nvidia's announcement, Kress said she was committed to "building on the extraordinary foundation Jensen created over the last 33 years." Invezz expects three questions to dominate the call: who now sets strategy, whether the customer-financing programme is being scaled back, and how much room an interim chief has to change course.
Leadership limbo, priced in?
Brokers were uneasy before the Journal story. Evercore ISI cut the stock to In Line and its target to $186 from $465, warning of possible "leadership limbo," Benzinga reported. Bernstein moved to Market Perform with a $200 target, according to Yahoo Finance. At least nine firms lowered targets on Thursday, Benzinga said.
Nvidia closed at $166.19 on Thursday, down 4.3%, after finishing Wednesday at $173.73, Yahoo Finance data show. That leaves it 30.5% below its 6 October closing high of $239.24, an Invezz calculation. In pre-market trading on Friday, hours after the Journal story appeared, the shares were at $167.22 at 9:07am GMT, about 0.6% above Thursday's close, Yahoo Finance data show.
What the board does next
The call on Nvidia's permanent leadership now rests with Harvey C. Jones, the board's first-ever chair, and his fellow directors. A sharp private jibe from a departed founder does not rule Kress out. It does give the board, and investors, a reason to ask whether Nvidia's interim leader has the standing to make big strategic calls, or whether the search will look outside. Her best reply is on Tuesday: the numbers, and how convincingly she explains what comes next.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice.
