Huang questioned Kress’s strategic judgment before she became interim CEO, WSJ reports

Nvidia’s interim chief, Collette Kress, has taken charge after her predecessor privately questioned her ability to help direct the company. Jensen Huang called her “a deer in the headlights” during a summer finance-team presentation, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing an anonymous source, according to TechCrunch’s November 13 account.

Huang also reportedly said Kress could not help him steer strategy or decision-making. Kress, Nvidia’s chief financial officer, replaced him as interim chief executive after he resigned on Thursday, November 12.

The financial guarantees behind the disagreement

The finance-team meeting concerned Nvidia’s plans to provide guarantees worth billions of dollars to data-center operators that could not afford to buy its chips upfront, according to the Journal. The discussion put customer financing at the center of Huang’s reported criticism.

Kress had questioned credit-based deals involving Huang’s son-in-law, Nico Caprez, the Journal reported. Her questions covered which deals would benefit Nvidia, how the company should assign a value to its guarantees, and how it should determine the returns on those commitments.

Earlier in the year, Kress had scaled back Nvidia’s commitment to OpenAI’s Ohio data-center project, TechCrunch says. That project provides a concrete example of her involvement in decisions about the size of Nvidia’s customer-financing commitments.

Kress has spent more than 13 years at Nvidia, after serving as senior vice president and CFO of Cisco’s Business Technology Operations Finance organization. She holds the interim CEO position while Nvidia searches for a permanent replacement for Huang, who led the company for more than 33 years.