NVIDIA's interim CEO, once underestimated by Jensen Huang.

This summer, Jensen Huang summoned a group of core financial executives to his office. The AI economy, propped up by Nvidia's increasingly aggressive backstop deals, was already teetering, and Huang wanted to make sure his team was handling things properly. At the meeting, he publicly and sharply criticized Colette Kress, who now runs Nvidia in his stead. A person familiar with the scene recounted it: Kress was giving a presentation when Huang cut her off, saying she looked like "a deer caught in the headlights," flustered and at a loss. He had gathered Kress and the finance leadership team to assess a problem that was snowballing: Nvidia was then in talks to provide billions of dollars in guarantees for companies that could not afford chips. Many of those deals were led by Huang's son-in-law, Nico Caprez, who offered financing to emerging cloud providers and data center developers in the hope of turning them into long-term customers. People familiar with the matter said Huang had earlier launched a frenzied expansion of deals, and by this point had begun to suspect he might have overreached. At the August meeting, Huang remarked that Kress was merely a "CFO who just keeps the books," incapable of helping him define strategy or make key decisions.