Nvidias Jensen Huang had clashed with interim CEO Colette Kress: Deer in the headlights

Nvidia’s interim CEO Colette Kress had a volatile relationship with ousted CEO Jensen Huang -– including a tense meeting this summer where Huang called her a “deer in the headlights,” according to a report.Kress – who has spent the past 13 years as Nvidia’s chief financial officer – had built a reputation for being the one executive willing to push back on Huang’s riskiest bets as he pushed for a series of multibillion-dollar AI investments, according to a Reuters report.On Thursday, 63-year-old Huang announced he was immediately resigning as CEO and a member of Nvidia’s board amid reports that he had affairs with a suspected Chinese spy and two executives at Nvidia.Kress, 59, was named interim CEO on Thursday as the company searches for a permanent replacement.Just three months earlier in August, tensions boiled over during a meeting when Huang tore into Kress and interrupted her presentation, calling her “a deer in the headlights,” according to the Wall Street Journal.Huang had pushed the company to make massive AI deals, but now he was questioning whether it had gone too far – and Kress was a “reporting CFO,” not someone who could help him make important decisions, he said during the meeting, according to the report.Kress had turned into a counterweight to Huang, as others in the industry started to grow concerned that tech firms like Nvidia might be overinvesting in AI – and that those booming profits they had been promised might not ever be realized, sources told Reuters.In the spring, Huang’s son-in-law Nico Caprez, vice president of global AI infrastructure growth at Nvidia, and another vice president, Raj Mirpuri, told prospective business partners that Nvidia would be able to line up credit-support deals within just a few weeks, the report said.But Kress warned such proposals would involve partners sharing a portion of their revenues with Nvidia, and tried to rein in Caprez, who had just been promoted to a vice president rol...