Nvidia’s interim CEO Colette Kress had a volatile relationship with ousted CEO Jensen Huang -– including a tense meeting this summer where Huang called her a “deer in the headlights,” according to a report.
Kress – who has spent the past 13 years as Nvidia’s chief financial officer – had built a reputation for being the one executive willing to push back on Huang’s riskiest bets as he pushed for a series of multibillion-dollar AI investments, according to a Reuters report.
On Thursday, 63-year-old Huang announced he was immediately resigning as CEO and a member of Nvidia’s board amid reports that he had affairs with a suspected Chinese spy and two executives at Nvidia.
Kress, 59, was named interim CEO on Thursday as the company searches for a permanent replacement.
Just three months earlier in August, tensions boiled over during a meeting when Huang tore into Kress and interrupted her presentation, calling her “a deer in the headlights,” according to the Wall Street Journal.
Huang had pushed the company to make massive AI deals, but now he was questioning whether it had gone too far – and Kress was a “reporting CFO,” not someone who could help him make important decisions, he said during the meeting, according to the report.
Kress had turned into a counterweight to Huang, as others in the industry started to grow concerned that tech firms like Nvidia might be overinvesting in AI – and that those booming profits they had been promised might not ever be realized, sources told Reuters.
In the spring, Huang’s son-in-law Nico Caprez, vice president of global AI infrastructure growth at Nvidia, and another vice president, Raj Mirpuri, told prospective business partners that Nvidia would be able to line up credit-support deals within just a few weeks, the report said.
But Kress warned such proposals would involve partners sharing a portion of their revenues with Nvidia, and tried to rein in Caprez, who had just been promoted to a vice president role in January, according to people who worked with her.
Huang’s chipmaker had become a family affair. His daughter Madison – Nico’s wife – and son Spencer also work at Nvidia. After news outlets reported on the affairs, Huang turned to Madison for advice, according to the Information, and she told her dad to find a new publicist fast, concerned that he soon wouldn’t be able to rely on the company’s spokesperson.
Kress and her staffers had pushed back on other deals that Huang and the company’s sales team were working on, including a proposed $250 billion plan to support an OpenAI data center project in Ohio, according to Reuters.
That plan was ultimately pared back to $120 billion, the report said.
“I think it’s unlikely anyone but Jensen is going to invest in his own customers as aggressively,” a source told Reuters, adding that Huang has even pushed Nvidia to offer financing to startups.
The pair also have different management styles, with Kress described by people who know her as a calmer figure compared to Huang’s confrontational approach, according to Reuters.
With Kress running the company, 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,” a source told the outlet.
Stephen Witt, the author of “The Thinking Machine,” a biography of Huang, wrote in a New York Times article Thursday that Huang liked to appear humble, always praising his employees, reminding others of his time spent as a dishwasher and leaving a huge tip at their visits to Denny’s.
But it was all “to cloak his arrogance,” Witt claimed. “He had little tolerance for disagreement and almost no capacity for open discourse. When you contradicted him, even over the most trivial matter, it was like lighting a fuse. Stick to your position, and soon he exploded, screaming at you for your idiocy.”
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