Winner
Colette Kress
Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer, Nvidia
This CFO Is Creating the Hardware Driving the AI Revolution — And Making Her Company One of the Most Valuable in the World
When Colette Kress was offered the CFO spot at Nvidia in 2013, her two sons encouraged her to take the job. At the time, Kress was SVP and CFO at Cisco’s Business Technology and Operations Finance division, and Nvidia was only known for making the chips that powered her son’s favorite computer games. Now, more than a decade later, Kress is widely credited for steering Nvidia into its enviable position as the world’s third most-valuable company after Microsoft and Apple. Nvidia is now the world leader in graphics processing units (GPUs), the chips that are powering the generative AI revolution. (They are designed to render graphics and images by performing rapid mathematical calculations.) She’s been called “instrumental in enabling one of the most incredible revenue ramps in technology history,” for positioning Nvidia to corner the market on AI hardware, a move that sent the company’s stock soaring by 239% in 2023. In March, the company unveiled its Blackwell platform, a “new class of AI superchip” that enables organizations to build and run generative AI at up to 25 times less cost and energy consumption than its predecessor.
By Audrey Goodson Kingo
