Nvidia names Colette Kress interim CEO after Jensen Huang resigns

By Sophie Lindqvist

Thursday’s premarket trading showed Nvidia shares down more than 11% after Jensen Huang resigned as president and chief executive. The report put Nvidia’s market capitalization loss since Friday at more than $300 billion.

In a regulatory filing, Nvidia said Thursday that its board had accepted Huang’s resignation on Wednesday. Current chief financial officer and executive vice president Colette Kress will serve as interim CEO until Nvidia finds a permanent successor, while continuing as CFO.

What changed at Nvidia?

Nvidia framed the departure through Huang’s legacy in a company statement:

“Jensen’s contributions to NVIDIA are profound. NVIDIA is one of the most consequential technology companies in the world. The Board and the company thank Jensen for his immeasurable contributions to the company and the industry,” the company said in a statement.

The board also appointed Harvey Jones as Nvidia’s first-ever chair. Jones is a managing partner of Square Wave Ventures, a former CEO of Synopsys and has served on Nvidia’s board since 1993. The move adds a long-serving director to the team managing the CEO search.

The report said the resignation came just a few days after Huang admitted to a romantic affair with someone it described as an alleged Chinese spy. It said the affair had sparked a U.S. national security crisis.

The immediate result is continuity in finance, with strategy waiting on a permanent leader.

Why did the market react so sharply?

The report said the departure carries broad implications for AI and data centers because Huang helped drive the AI boom through Nvidia. It raises questions about the company’s sprawling AI investments, which have helped bankroll startups developing new technologies and the large data centers needed to run them.

Under Huang, Nvidia used its financial muscle to support companies buying its chips. The report said this effectively helped finance the market for Nvidia’s own products. His departure therefore affects both the company supplying AI hardware and the capital structure around its customers.

The market is now testing whether Nvidia’s board will preserve that financing model while it searches for Huang’s successor.

How does Nvidia finance the AI market?

The scale of that strategy appears in Nvidia’s figures for the end of its second quarter:

• $99 billion in investments, reported as of the end of the second quarter.
• Another $25 billion in commitments, reported as of the end of the second quarter.
• $36 billion in cloud service commitments, covering arrangements with AI cloud operators.

The last category shows the mechanism most directly. The report said these arrangements help AI cloud operators finance the GPUs and data center equipment they buy from Nvidia. Nvidia also said it will buy compute from those operators and could earn a share of their revenue.

That structure links chip sales with future compute purchases. It gives cloud operators a financing route for Nvidia hardware while giving Nvidia future capacity and potential revenue. The arrangement turns customer financing into part of Nvidia’s own demand strategy.

Kress inherits those commitments in a new role that combines finance and chief executive duties. The report said Huang’s departure leaves open questions about who will guide the strategy next and how quickly its investments will move.

Nvidia has become both the supplier and a financier of the market it serves.

Where has Nvidia placed its bets?

Nvidia has also invested directly in neoclouds, the companies that provide much of the processing capacity for AI workloads. It invested $2 billion in CoreWeave in January and another $2 billion in Nebius in March.

The report also said Nvidia was considering becoming a guarantor for Nscale’s planned West Virginia data center project. That proposed role would sit alongside Nvidia’s direct equity investments and customer-financing commitments.

These direct investments sit beside broader customer finance and guarantee plans. Together, they show how far Nvidia’s role reaches beyond selling processors.

The bets extend Nvidia’s reach from chips into the infrastructure that buys and runs them.

What does the Ohio guarantee mean for risk?

Separately, Nvidia signed up to provide up to $105 billion in credit guarantees for an OpenAI data center campus in Ohio. The report said the arrangement could leave Nvidia with substantial financial exposure if the project runs into trouble.

The words “up to” matter because $105 billion is a ceiling on guarantees, not a stated amount Nvidia has already spent. The number is also larger than the $99 billion investment figure Nvidia reported at the end of its second quarter.

A project failure would not necessarily produce the full $105 billion loss, but the agreement gives Nvidia exposure well beyond the price of a chip order. That makes the Ohio campus a direct test of balance-sheet discipline during the leadership transition.

The Ohio deal is the largest stated financial contingency attached to the succession.

Who will shape policy and strategy?

The report said that under Huang, Nvidia lobbied Washington to relax potential rules around AI and data center regulation. That lobbying work now belongs to Kress in her interim role, with Jones leading the board.

Jones’s appointment creates a clear division between board leadership and day-to-day management, at least for now. His tenure since 1993 gives the board continuity, but it does not answer who will set Nvidia’s long-term AI strategy.

Any permanent successor will have to decide whether to preserve the company’s close ties with AI operators, startups and data center developers. The new leadership will also decide how much risk to carry through guarantees and financing commitments.

The policy stance may be the least visible test of the new leadership.

What should investors watch next?

The first test is Kress’s handling of $99 billion in investments, $25 billion in commitments and $36 billion in cloud service commitments. Investors will look for any change in pace, risk limits or the balance between financing customers and selling them more GPUs.

The second test is project-level exposure. Updates on the OpenAI campus in Ohio and Nscale’s planned West Virginia facility would show whether Nvidia keeps large contingent positions while it lacks a permanent chief executive.

The third test is the CEO search. Jones’s appointment creates a clear division between board leadership and day-to-day management, at least for now. Any permanent appointment could reset how the company presents its unusually broad financial role in the AI market.

Until a permanent CEO arrives, Kress’s decisions on those commitments will carry more weight than Nvidia’s broad statements about the future of AI.