Nvidia names CFO Colette Kress interim CEO after Huang resigns

Kress, who is also Nvidia’s executive vice president, will remain CFO while the company searches for a permanent successor. The board also appointed Harvey Jones, managing partner of Square Wave Ventures and a former Synopsys CEO, as Nvidia’s first chair of the board. Jones has served on the board since 1993.

Nvidia shares fell nearly 12% in early trading Thursday. Since Friday, the stock has dropped sharply, wiping out more than $300 billion in market value. The departure raises questions about the company’s role in financing the AI and data-center expansion. Under Huang, Nvidia backed companies that bought its chips, helping fund demand for its own products, and lobbied Washington over potential AI and data-center rules.

At the end of its second quarter, Nvidia reported $99 billion in investments and a further $25 billion in commitments. It also had $36 billion in cloud-service commitments. These arrangements help AI cloud operators finance Nvidia GPUs and data-center equipment; Nvidia has said it will buy computing capacity from those operators and may receive a share of their revenue.

Nvidia invested $2 billion in CoreWeave in January and another $2 billion in Nebius in March. The company was also reported to be considering guaranteeing Nscale’s planned West Virginia data-center project and has signed up to provide as much as $105 billion in credit guarantees for an OpenAI campus in Ohio.

Investors have been concerned about the debt companies are taking on to build AI infrastructure. CoreWeave shares fell about 12% in premarket trading Thursday after rising 25% Wednesday; Nebius was down 20% and IREN 8%. Nvidia said Huang’s contributions to the company and industry were “profound” and thanked him for them.