Colette Kress, the new interim CEO of Nvidia

Nvidia announced on Thursday that Colette Kress, its chief financial officer, will succeed Jensen Huang as interim CEO. As a result, Kress will be in charge of the chipmaker, whose processors power the most sophisticated supercomputers and AI data centers in the world.

The hiring comes after the board of directors decided to fire CEO and co-founder Jensen Huang due to allegations of two extramarital romances, one of which involved a woman who was allegedly a Chinese spy.

Kress worked in finance positions at Texas Instruments for eight years prior to joining Nvidia. He then worked at Microsoft from 1997 to 2010. In 2006, she was named Chief Financial Officer of Microsoft’s Server and Tools division, where she oversaw the company’s financial planning, strategy, and reporting.

She began working for Cisco in 2010 as the Chief Financial Officer and Senior Vise President of the Business Technology and Operations Finance division, where she was in charge of business development and financial planning. She quit the company to work for Nvidia in 2013.

The annual report that Nvidia submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) states that Kress has a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Southern Methodist University and a bachelor’s degree in finance from the University of Arizona. According to a 2024 Fortune article, she worked in financial positions at large tech organizations for about 25 years before joining Nvidia. When she started working at Nvidia in 2013, it was the smallest firm she had ever been a part of, she told Fortune.