Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigns, CFO Colette Kress takes interim role

Nvidia co-founder Jensen Huang has resigned as president, chief executive and a member of the board, effective immediately. The company announced the departure on November 12 and named Colette Kress, its executive vice president and chief financial officer, as interim CEO. Huang had held all three positions since Nvidia was founded in 1993.

Kress will keep her finance responsibilities while the board considers candidates from inside and outside the company. Harvey C. Jones, the newly appointed board chair, said he expects operations, commitments to customers and the product roadmap to continue without disruption. Nvidia kept its November 17 earnings date.

Nvidia’s finance chief takes charge

Kress joined Nvidia as CFO in September 2013. Her appointment announcement at the time said she had spent the previous three years overseeing finances for Cisco’s business and technology operations, including planning and reporting for its engineering and business units. Before Cisco she spent 13 years at Microsoft, four of them as finance chief for its server and tools division. At Nvidia she originally reported to Huang.

Nvidia released its fiscal second-quarter results on August 26 for the period ended July 26. It reported $96.2 billion in revenue, including $89 billion from its data center business. Data center sales accounted for about 93 percent of total revenue and were up 18 percent from the previous quarter and 117 percent from a year earlier. In the same release, Nvidia said its Vera Rubin platform for AI computing was moving into full production, with racks already running at partners including CoreWeave, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. The leadership announcement gave no new delivery dates for specific products.

The board appoints its first chair

Nvidia named Jones its first board chair. He joined the board in 1993, the year the company was founded. Its May proxy statement listed him as an independent director and a member of the audit and nominating and corporate governance committees. He previously served as CEO and executive chair of Synopsys, which makes chip design software.

The proxy described a board led by an independent lead director, then Stephen Neal. The lead director helped oversee management and served as a link between executives and the board. Under Nvidia’s governance rules, a majority of independent directors selects a lead director annually when the board has no chair. The rules already allowed the board to appoint a chair. The November appointments put Jones in charge of the board and Kress in charge of the business.

On November 8, Nvidia’s board announced an independent investigation following news reports about Huang. It assigned oversight to a committee of independent directors. On November 10 the directors announced they had retained Joon H. Kim, a former acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, and his law firm. The resignation release gave no reason for Huang’s departure or findings from the inquiry.

The November 17 earnings call stays on the calendar

Nvidia expects to release results at about 1:20 p.m. Pacific time on November 17 and hold the earnings call at 2 p.m. Pacific. That is about 6:20 a.m. for the results and 7 a.m. for the call the following day in South Korea. The results cover Nvidia’s fiscal third quarter, which ended on October 25.

Under the schedule Nvidia published on October 28, it will post Kress’s written commentary on its investor relations site just after releasing the figures. The webcast will carry prepared remarks and a question-and-answer session for financial analysts and institutional investors. Other listeners can follow the webcast live.

Nvidia plans to keep the replay available until its next earnings call, which will cover the fourth quarter and full fiscal year. The November results and Kress’s commentary will be the first quarterly materials the company releases under its new leadership. The board has yet to give a timetable for appointing a permanent CEO.