New York: Collette Kress, the interim CEO of Nvidia, vowed on Thursday to continue to “play a vital role in building the technology that is powering the AI revolution”.
In a message to the company staff, Kress said that she and the board recognise this has been an “extraordinarily difficult period”.
Her immediate role is to stabilise the company roiled by the scandal of its disgraced founder and head, Jensen Huang, who quit as allegations swirled that the woman he had a affair with was a China spying asset.
China has denied that the woman, Alice Le Huang (not his relative despite the shared surname) was connected to it.
Huang was also reported to have had an affair with a senior staffer in violation of the company code of conduct.
The veteran of the technology sector, having worked for Microsoft, Texas Instruments and Cisco in finance roles, Kress has a momentous task ahead, taking control of a company that had a centralised structure with about 60 department leaders reporting directly to Huang.
As the company’s CFO, she was probably the only senior executive to have had responsibilities spanning the company, making her the company’s board choice to be the interim CEO of the technology behemoth.
Nvidia’s board chair Harvey Jones said, “Colette has helped lead Nvidia through a period of extraordinary growth and has a deep understanding of our business, customers, operations and financial position”.
Aarti Shah, a former senior vice president and chief information and digital officer at Eli Lilly, was one of the Nvidia board members involved in the decision to elevate Kress.
Kress will also face issues relating to Huang’s close ties to President Donald Trump and his lobbying to relax restrictions on exporting Nvidia’s chips to China.
Nvidia’s chips, the most advanced in the world, are crucial for the US leadership in AI, swatting challenges from China.
Kress joined Nvidia in 2013 when it was a relatively small company specialising in the narrow field of graphics chips for gaming computers.
She played an important role in the company’s transformation into a provider of chips to power the AI revolution by harnessing the power designed for gaming chips.
While few officials of Nvidia had a public profile, Kress was often on the quarterly earnings calls, making her known to analysts and investors.
She has also led negotiations with other companies like OpenAI, where Nvidia has invested $30 billion.
Kress, who was born in 1967, is reported to have become a billionaire with the company’s rise.
(IANS)
