Colette Kress is not an airborne fire captain. Having been CFO at NVIDIA for more than ten years, her role within the company is more like a person who applies the brakes.
The Information revealed a detail. Nvidia originally planned to provide OpenAI with a $250 billion credit guarantee so that it could use the latest chips to fill an 8-gigawatt data center. Kress was not opposed to lending money to OpenAI, but worried that such a large guarantee would scare investors, and ultimately lowered the number to about $100 billion. With one stroke, 150 billion were missing.
She's also been doing something else over the past few months: spreading the company's financial risks away from a few big customers and spreading them to more customers.
Behind this is a structural issue that has been discussed by the outside world for a long time. While Nvidia sells chips, it also invests, guarantees, and finances companies that buy chips. The money goes out from the left hand and comes back from the right. The revenue looks good, but the risks are quietly increasing. When Huang Renxun was in office, such transactions were promoted vigorously.
The current time is not good either. Data center construction has been delayed, some cloud orders have been cancelled, and the return rate of AI infrastructure has been repeatedly questioned. These news have appeared in the past month. The market is willing to believe that a temporary leader with a financial background will tighten the scale of guarantees and customer financing.
However, how much the interim CEO can move depends on how much authority the board of directors gives, and when the official successor will be in place. The real signal may come on next week's earnings call: If management starts talking about customer financing in words like "prudent" and "returns," it means there has indeed been a change of direction.