Nvidia Names CFO Colette Kress Interim CEO as Board Seeks Successor
Nvidia named CFO Colette Kress interim CEO as its board searches for a successor to Jensen Huang. Arm CEO Rene Haas, a former Nvidia executive, is among the outside names analysts are floating, alongside Lisa Su, Tim Cook and others.
Nvidia has named Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress interim CEO while its board searches for a permanent successor to Jensen Huang, and Arm CEO Rene Haas is among the outside candidates analysts are naming.
Kress has been Nvidia's CFO since 2013 and will keep that role alongside the interim post. Reports also say Nvidia has approached Haas about the job.
Why Haas is on the list
Shay Boloor, chief market strategist at The Futurum Group, is backing Haas if Nvidia looks outside. "He spent seven years at Nvidia and understands Jensen's culture," Boloor wrote in a post on X.
Boloor also pointed to a technical link. Nvidia's Grace and Vera processors run on Arm's chip architecture. Haas "understands [the] CPU side of Nvidia's platform better than almost anyone else on the outside," Boloor wrote.
Sam Sugarman, who leads the secondaries practice at Concordia Capital, also put Haas on his list of external candidates.
Haas steered Arm through its 2023 stock market debut and expanded the company beyond licensing processor designs. His background spans engineering, product strategy and sales.
There is a catch. Haas left Nvidia in 2013, and the board would have to judge whether running Arm has prepared him for a far larger and more complex business.
Other names in the mix
Sugarman also named AMD CEO Lisa Su, who has led the chipmaker since 2014 and turned it into a rival to Nvidia in AI chips. Persuading a sitting chief executive to leave a company she rebuilt would be hard, he noted.
Dan Ives, a partner at Yorkville Ives & Co., sees three leading outsiders: Tim Cook, Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, and Nikesh Arora, chairman and CEO of Palo Alto Networks.
Cook spent 15 years running Apple and became executive chairman in September. His supply-chain skills and Apple's in-house chip work could fit Nvidia, but his chairman duties at Apple could complicate any approach. President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that Cook should replace Huang.
Kurian took over Google Cloud in 2019 after 22 years at Oracle. He has worked closely with Nvidia through the companies' AI infrastructure partnership.
Scott W. Simmons, co-managing partner at executive search firm Crist Kolder Associates, called Kress "very much the right interim CEO." He expects the board to seek a technologist as the permanent pick, potentially from outside the company.
Reports also name Nvidia cofounder Chris Malachowsky as a potential successor to Huang.
