Months before Colette Kress replaced him as Nvidia’s chief executive, Jensen Huang belittled her in front of the company’s top finance team, according to a Wall Street Journal report by Anissa Gardizy and Robbie Whelan. At a meeting in August, Huang called Kress “a deer in the headlights” while interrupting her presentation, according to a person familiar with the comments. He also described her as a “reporting CFO”, rather than someone who could help him define a strategy or make decisions, the Journal reports.
Kress became interim chief executive on 12 November, when Nvidia announced that Huang had resigned after 33 years in charge.
The report also sheds light on the business pressures Huang was dealing with before the scandal broke. According to the Journal, he had summoned his senior finance executives to diagnose what it calls a “ballooning problem”. Nvidia was in talks to provide billions of dollars of guarantees to companies that could not afford its chips, and Huang was starting to question whether the dealmaking spree he had launched had gone too far. The Journal’s subheadline says Kress, now in charge, has questioned some of that dealmaking.
Huang’s own warning was about customers walking away and supply piling up
Some of the guarantee deals were led by Huang’s son-in-law, who works at Nvidia, according to the Journal. He had been offering financing to upstart cloud providers and data centre developers, in the hope of turning them into long-term Nvidia customers. TalkEsport is not naming him, as he is not a public figure, although the Journal identifies him.
During the same August meeting, Huang described a difficult picture for the company, the Journal reports. Major cloud providers were running away from Nvidia, he said, making plans to use alternative chips and reduce their reliance on the firm. The largest of those providers already build their own AI processors, such as Google’s Tensor Processing Units and Amazon’s Trainium chips. Huang also said that the supply of chip wafers and memory Nvidia had committed to buy was coming at him “like an avalanche”.
Those comments matter because they come from inside the company, and from Huang himself. They suggest that he saw financing and supply commitments as a growing risk months before his personal life became the story. The Journal’s account relies on people familiar with the matter, and TalkEsport has not found a public response from Kress, Huang or Nvidia to the report.
Kress now runs the company whose deals she questioned
Kress has been Nvidia’s chief financial officer since 2013, after senior finance roles at Cisco and Microsoft, and she keeps that job while serving as interim chief executive. In its announcement, Nvidia said the board has “full confidence in Colette and the leadership team”. Harvey Jones, a former Synopsys chief executive, became the company’s first board chair at the same time, and the board says it will consider internal and external candidates for the permanent role.
The Journal’s report gives that board a different picture of the person it has put in charge. Huang’s description of Kress as a “reporting CFO” suggests he saw her as someone who reported numbers rather than shaped strategy. The report’s account of her questioning his deals points the other way, towards an executive willing to challenge the founder on financial risk. Either way, the deals and commitments described in the August meeting now sit with her.
Kress faces her first earnings call five days after Huang’s exit
The pressure on Nvidia has not eased since the announcement. Its shares fell 4.34% on Thursday, the day the leadership change was announced, and the scandal around Huang has continued to grow. Sources have since alleged a third relationship with a second Nvidia employee, and Singapore has said it barred Alice Huang from re-entry in February.
Nvidia will report its third-quarter results on Tuesday 17 November at about 1:20 pm Pacific time, with its earnings call at 2 pm Pacific, or 22:00 UTC. It will be the company’s first results under an interim chief executive. It will also be the first chance for investors to question Kress directly about the financing deals and supply commitments described in the Journal’s report.
