Three months before he resigned, Jensen Huang reportedly publicly belittled the executive who has now taken his job. He interrupted Colette Kress mid-presentation and called her 'a deer in the headlights'.
According to WSJ, Huang summoned his top finance executives to his office this summer. The AI economy, which Nvidia has propped up with increasingly aggressive bets, was looking shaky, and Huang wanted to be sure his team was handling it properly. Over the course of the meeting, he laid into Kress. Huang also told the room that Kress was a CFO who reports figures rather than someone who could help him shape strategy or make decisions.
What had Huang worried
Huang reportedly called the meeting to deal with a growing problem. Nvidia was in talks to provide billions of dollars in guarantees to companies that could not afford its chips. Some of those deals were led by Huang's son-in-law, Nico Caprez, who had been offering financing to upstart cloud providers and data-center developers in the hope of turning them into long-term customers.
Huang had gone on a dealmaking spree, according to the report, and was beginning to wonder whether it had gone too far. He told the group that major cloud providers were moving away from Nvidia and planning to use alternative chips. He also said the chip wafers and memory Nvidia had committed to buying were bearing down on him like an avalanche.
Kress's earlier questions
The WSJ traced the tension back to the spring. It reported that Caprez and another vice president, Raj Mirpuri, told prospective partners Nvidia could arrange credit-support deals within weeks. Dozens of companies signed up, hoping Nvidia's backing would reduce their borrowing costs. In return, Nvidia proposed that cloud providers share part of their revenue.
As the programme rolled out, Kress raised questions about how to choose which deals to pursue, how to value the guarantees and how to calculate returns. People who worked with her said she also tried behind the scenes to rein in Caprez, who was promoted to vice president in January.
Nvidia pushed ahead. The company was in talks with OpenAI to provide a financial backstop for the largest data-center deal ever, an Ohio facility that would be the biggest in the world. OpenAI was negotiating to lease the entire campus and fill it with around $300 billion worth of Nvidia chips. The backstop was meant to make banks more comfortable about lending, since OpenAI would be on the hook for the lease payments.
Huang resigned on Thursday, and the board named Kress interim CEO while it searches for a permanent successor. Kress remains CFO during the interim period, and Harvey Jones was named the company's first-ever board chair. His exit came days after he admitted to a romantic affair with an alleged Chinese spy. Kress will address employees at a company meeting on November 18.
