Nvidia's Interim CEO Was Called 'A Deer in the Headlights' by Jensen Huang

Jensen Huang described his successor as interim CEO, Collette Kress, as "a deer in the headlights" during a presentation earlier this summer, according to a Wall Street Journal report citing an anonymous source. The remark has surfaced at the moment Kress takes control of a company that Huang ran for more than 33 years.

What did Huang actually say?

Huang made the comment during a meeting with Nvidia's finance team. The subject of that meeting was a plan to provide guarantees worth billions of dollars to data center operators that could not afford to buy Nvidia's chips upfront — a financing mechanism that puts vendor capital, not just product, at the center of the business.

He reportedly went further. According to the report, Huang said Kress was a person who could not help him steer strategy or decision-making.

The takeaway: the man who built Nvidia into the dominant AI chip supplier had, months before stepping aside, voiced doubts about the executive now running the company.

Who is Collette Kress?

Kress is not a newcomer. She has spent more than 13 years at Nvidia as CFO, and before that she served as SVP and CFO of Cisco's Business Technology Operations Finance.

Within Nvidia, the Journal reports, she has pushed back on the company's program-focused, credit-based deals — arrangements that involved Huang's son-in-law, Nico Caprez. Her questions were operational and basic to any finance function:

• How to decide which deals are beneficial
• How to value the guarantees Nvidia extends
• How to determine the returns on those commitments

That skepticism produced at least one concrete result. Earlier in the year, Kress scaled back Nvidia's commitment to OpenAI's Ohio data center project. Nvidia had been in talks to provide $250 billion in credit; it ended up committing $105 billion — a reduction of $145 billion, or nearly 60 percent of the original figure.

The takeaway: Kress has already demonstrated she will cut the size of a deal she considers poorly understood or overextended.

Why did Huang resign?

Huang resigned Thursday after reports of two extramarital affairs, one of them with Kimberly Powell, the company's VP for healthcare. After the resignation, Reuters reported a third affair with another employee.

The leadership crisis runs deeper than personal conduct. The company is also investigating a possible Chinese espionage plot, according to the report.

Nvidia is now searching for a permanent CEO — its first change at the top in more than three decades.

What does this mean for Nvidia's customers and partners?

The tension at the center of this story is financial, not just personal. Huang championed massive credit and guarantee programs to keep chips flowing to operators who could not pay upfront. Kress questioned how those commitments were valued and what they returned.

Her first major decision on that front — trimming the OpenAI credit line from $250 billion to $105 billion — suggests a more conservative posture toward vendor financing. Enterprises that depend on Nvidia-financed infrastructure deals may find the terms harder to justify to a CFO-led organization.

The takeaway: the interim CEO's record points to tighter scrutiny of the financing structures that fueled Nvidia's data center growth.