Meet Nvidia’s billionaire interim CEO, Colette Kress - she helped turn the chipmaker into a nearly $4 trillion giant and took home $16 million last year

Nvidia just named longtime chief financial officer Colette Kress as its interim chief executive officer on Thursday following the resignation of embattled leader Jensen Huang .

Kress, 59, wasn’t publicly positioned as Huang’s successor , and in a rare interview in 2022, Kress told Fortune that becoming a C-suite leader was never necessarily her career goal.

Rather, she said, she’s been driven by a curiosity about other people’s jobs—and a desire to keep learning.

“I think honestly, throughout my career, I was just always fascinated by somebody else’s role,” Kress said. “And sometimes that was my boss’ role. So, it worked more in that manner than waking up as a child and saying, ‘I want to be a CFO.’ I just get excited about learning new things.”

Kress, who has an estimated net worth of $1.2 billion according to Forbes , holds a bachelor’s in finance from the University of Arizona and an MBA from Southern Methodist University.

After nearly three decades’ worth of financial roles at companies such as Texas Instruments , Cisco, and Microsoft , she joined Nvidia in September 2013.

Since then, she guided the company’s finances through a significant transformation, from a business largely focused on video game hardware to a chipmaking powerhouse at the center of the AI boom.

Nvidia’s revenue has soared during Kress’s tenure, growing from $4.13 billion in fiscal 2014 to $130.5 billion in fiscal 2025. Its market capitalization has climbed roughly 44,000%, from about $9 billion when she joined in 2013 to nearly $4 trillion today. Adjusted for stock splits , Nvidia shares traded at roughly 40 cents apiece when Kress arrived, compared with more than $160 today.

According to Nvidia’s 2026 corporate annual report , Kress—who was ranked No. 49 on Fortune’s list of the 2026 Most Powerful Women—earned a $900,000 base salary in fiscal 2026, but her total compensation reached $16 million.

She also holds more than 4 million Nvidia shares, the second-largest stake among the company’s executives, behind Huang, who owns roughly 870 million shares. She became a billionaire in 2025 off the back of Nvidia’s soaring stock.

“We do not waste a day, we don’t waste a dime,” Kress told computing publisher The Next Platform in 2024. “And those two things are really important about us, our agility to move fast, but our ability to not waste things along the way.”

As Nvidia has also grown in terms of headcount—from roughly 8,000 employees when Kress joined to more than 40,000 today —Kress has emphasized the importance of surrounding herself with people who can teach her something and help lead the company forward.

“Some of the things learned since childhood is to surround yourself with people that you can learn from; people that can help lead,” Kress said. “And honestly, the employees that come in, that’s exactly what they are doing. They are choosing Nvidia for the talent, and the products that they’re going to work on. When we start reading our email in the morning, we’re buzzing— ‘Here we go! I’m learning something every moment.’ That learning opportunity is built into the culture.”

That leadership has also earned her considerable respect on Wall Street. Tech analyst Dan Ives praised Kress’s financial leadership in a 2024 interview with Fortune .

“The CFO leadership at Nvidia from Colette Kress has been instrumental in Nvidia’s success with Wall Street, and is key to Jensen’s vision,” Ives said. “She is extremely well respected both internally at Nvidia and across the tech industry.”