On November 11, NVIDIA’s board accepted Jensen Huang’s resignation as CEO of the company he co-founded in 1993. The board appointed Colette Kress, NVIDIA’s CFO since 2013, as interim CEO while it searches for a permanent replacement. She’s keeping her CFO job as well. When NVIDIA filed the news with the SEC the next day, Kress signed the filing under both titles.
This week, commentators described Kress’s appointment as a glass cliff. The term refers to women who are put in charge during a crisis, when the odds of failure are highest. How steep that cliff is depends on the commitments Kress now has to manage.
Over the past year, Huang turned NVIDIA into more than a chip supplier. NVIDIA now guarantees data center leases for its customers, commits to buying computing capacity from the companies it sells to, and invests in AI model makers and the companies that finance AI infrastructure. Huang built that strategy while NVIDIA was buying back its stock at more than $200 a share. Kress takes it over with NVIDIA’s shares about a third below their 52-week high. They closed at $162.85 on November 13, down from a high of $243.37.
Some of those commitments only cost NVIDIA if its customers run into trouble. One of them makes NVIDIA the buyer of last resort for computing capacity its partners can’t sell. The weaker demand for AI computing gets, the more capacity NVIDIA could end up buying.
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Below, you’ll see every commitment Kress inherits, which ones depend on NVIDIA’s partners staying healthy, and what a weaker market changes for each. You’ll go into NVIDIA’s earnings call on Tuesday knowing which figures to compare.