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

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Colette Kress never sought out to be a CFO. But after leading Nvidia’s finances for over a decade, she’s now tasked with replacing Jensen Huang.

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.

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