Colette Kress

Colette Kress
Born	Colette M. Kress
Nationality	American
Occupation	Corporate executive, Chief Financial Officer
Title	Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Employer	Nvidia Corporation
Known for	CFO of Nvidia during the company's rise to become the world's most valuable publicly traded company

Colette M. Kress is an American corporate executive who has served as the Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Nvidia Corporation since September 2013. In this role, she has overseen the financial operations of the Santa Clara, California–based semiconductor company during a period of extraordinary growth, as Nvidia transformed from a company primarily known for gaming graphics processing units (GPUs) into the dominant supplier of hardware powering the global artificial intelligence (AI) boom. When Kress joined Nvidia, the company's shares were trading at approximately 40 cents apiece on a split-adjusted basis; by mid-2025, the company had surpassed a US$5 trillion market capitalization, making it one of the most valuable corporations in history. Kress's tenure has coincided with Nvidia's revenue expanding from billions to over $130 billion annually, placing her among the most prominent CFOs in the technology industry. In July 2025, reporting indicated that Kress had crossed the billion-dollar personal net worth threshold, largely through equity holdings accumulated during her time at Nvidia, placing her in a rare category among sitting chief financial officers.

Early Life

Limited publicly documented information is available regarding Colette Kress's early life and upbringing. According to Business Insider's profile of Kress, she built a career in corporate finance across several major technology companies before joining Nvidia. Further details about her birthdate, birthplace, and family background have not been widely reported in the sourced materials available.

Career

Pre-Nvidia Career

Before joining Nvidia, Colette Kress held senior financial positions at several prominent technology and semiconductor companies. According to Business Insider's profile, she accumulated extensive experience in corporate finance within the technology sector prior to being recruited to Nvidia in 2013. Her background in finance at technology firms prepared her for the role of overseeing Nvidia's financial strategy during what would become one of the most significant growth periods in the history of the semiconductor industry.

Appointment as Nvidia CFO

Kress joined Nvidia as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer in September 2013. At the time of her arrival, Nvidia was primarily recognized as a maker of GPUs for the PC gaming market, and the company's shares were trading at approximately 40 cents per share on a split-adjusted basis. The company, founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem, had established itself as a significant player in the graphics and visual computing market but had not yet emerged as the dominant force in AI computing that it would later become.

Growth During the AI Boom

Kress's tenure as CFO has spanned a transformational era for Nvidia. The company's early investment of over a billion dollars in developing CUDA—a software platform and application programming interface (API) that enabled GPUs to be used for general-purpose parallel computing—laid the groundwork for Nvidia's dominance in AI hardware. Under Kress's financial stewardship, Nvidia capitalized on the explosive growth in demand for AI training and inference hardware that accelerated in the early 2020s and reached extraordinary proportions beginning in 2023.

In 2023, Nvidia became the seventh U.S. company to reach a market valuation of US$1 trillion. By 2025, driven by surging global demand for AI data center hardware, the company became the first in the world to surpass both US$4 trillion and US$5 trillion in market capitalization. Nvidia generated over $130 billion in revenue over the trailing twelve-month period through late 2025, reflecting a 114% year-over-year increase. The company was selected as one of Bloomberg's "Magnificent Seven"—the seven largest companies by market capitalization on the U.S. stock market.

As CFO, Kress has been responsible for communicating Nvidia's financial performance and outlook to investors. In November 2025, she indicated that Nvidia had "visibility to a half a trillion dollars" in revenue through 2026, a figure that, if realized, would place the company among the largest revenue-generating corporations in the United States. Such revenue levels would position Nvidia to enter the top ten of the Fortune 500 ranking.

Kress has also been a prominent voice in defending Nvidia's competitive position. In December 2025, speaking at a public event, she stated that Nvidia was "absolutely not" losing its lead in the AI semiconductor race, directly responding to arguments that competitors were closing the gap with the company. At the same event, she acknowledged that a reported US$100 billion deal with OpenAI had "still" not been signed, two months after reports of the potential arrangement had helped fuel a rally in AI-related stocks. Kress also stated during the event that the company was "absolutely not" threatened by competitors such as Google in the AI chip market.

Financial Communications and Investor Relations

In her role as CFO, Kress has served as the primary interface between Nvidia and its investor community. She regularly provides written CFO commentary ahead of Nvidia's quarterly earnings conference calls, a practice that has become a closely watched event on Wall Street given Nvidia's outsized influence on the broader stock market and technology sector. Nvidia's investor relations materials, including annual reports and proxy statements, are issued under Kress's oversight as the company's chief financial officer.

The significance of Nvidia's quarterly earnings calls—and by extension Kress's role in delivering the financial results—grew substantially during the AI boom. As Nvidia came to control more than 80% of the market for GPUs used in training and deploying AI models and supplied chips for over 75% of the world's TOP500 supercomputers, each earnings report became a bellwether event for the broader technology and financial markets.

Nvidia's Product and Market Expansion

During Kress's tenure, Nvidia expanded well beyond its original GPU gaming business into a diversified technology company. The company developed and marketed products across several segments, including data center GPUs for AI and high-performance computing, professional visualization tools, automotive computing platforms, and networking hardware. Nvidia's automotive technology division developed platforms for autonomous driving and infotainment systems. The company also developed data processing units (DPUs) for data center networking and announced the Grace CPU for AI and high-performance computing workloads, marking Nvidia's entry into central processing unit design.

Nvidia also posted record sales during the COVID-19 pandemic, as demand for both gaming and data center chips surged. The company reported record sales driven by sustained demand for gaming and data center chips during 2020.

Throughout this expansion, the financial strategy and capital allocation decisions overseen by Kress helped position Nvidia to meet the enormous capital requirements of scaling its data center business while simultaneously investing in new product lines and maintaining strong returns for shareholders. As of fiscal year 2025, Nvidia employed approximately 36,000 people worldwide.

Stock Transactions

As a senior executive of a publicly traded company, Kress's stock transactions are subject to disclosure requirements under U.S. securities regulations. In February 2026, regulatory filings indicated that Kress sold 27,640 shares of Nvidia stock. Such transactions by corporate insiders are routine and are typically conducted under pre-arranged trading plans established in accordance with Rule 10b5-1 of the Securities Exchange Act.

Personal Life

Publicly available information about Kress's personal life is limited. In July 2025, CFO.com reported that Kress had crossed the billion-dollar personal net worth threshold, joining what the publication described as a "rare billionaire CFO club." Her wealth has been attributed primarily to substantial equity holdings in Nvidia accumulated over more than a decade of service as the company's CFO. The appreciation of Nvidia's stock price—from approximately 40 cents per share (split-adjusted) when she joined in 2013 to levels supporting a multi-trillion-dollar market capitalization by 2025—was the primary driver of this wealth accumulation.

Recognition

Colette Kress has received significant attention from the business and financial press for her role in managing the finances of what became the world's most valuable publicly traded company. Business Insider published a detailed profile of Kress in April 2025, describing her as having "overseen the chipmaker's meteoric rise." CFO.com highlighted her crossing of the billion-dollar net worth mark in July 2025, noting the rarity of a sitting CFO achieving such a financial milestone.

Her public statements and commentary on Nvidia's financial results have been widely covered by major financial outlets, including Axios, Fortune, Yahoo Finance, and The Wall Street Journal. The level of media attention reflects both Nvidia's position as the most valuable company in the world and Kress's role as the principal communicator of the company's financial performance to the investment community.

Legacy

As of early 2026, Colette Kress remains in her position as Nvidia's CFO, making definitive assessments of her legacy premature. However, her tenure has coincided with one of the most dramatic increases in corporate value in business history. When she joined Nvidia in September 2013, the company was a mid-sized semiconductor firm; by 2025, it had become the first company in the world to surpass US$5 trillion in market capitalization. The company's revenue grew to over $130 billion on a trailing twelve-month basis, with visibility toward half a trillion dollars in revenue through 2026.

Kress's role in this transformation has been principally that of the financial steward—managing capital allocation, investor communications, and financial strategy during a period in which Nvidia became central to the global technology infrastructure supporting artificial intelligence. Her sustained tenure of more than twelve years as CFO through this period of growth is itself notable, as executive turnover in the technology sector tends to be relatively high.

The fact that Kress became a billionaire while serving as a CFO—a position that typically does not generate the same level of wealth as a founder or CEO—has been cited as evidence of the exceptional nature of Nvidia's growth trajectory and the value of long-term equity compensation in high-growth technology companies.