Nvidia CFO Colette Kress: ‘AI is no longer a nice-to-have’
· Fortune
Nvidia’s rise from chipmaker to AI infrastructure powerhouse has transformed it into one of the world’s most valuable companies. Leading the financial operation behind that ascent is CFO Colette Kress, No. 49 on the 2026 Fortune Most Powerful Women list.
Kress joined Nvidia in 2013. Before that, she was SVP and CFO of Cisco’s Business Technology and Operations Finance organization. She also spent 13 years at Microsoft, including four years as CFO of its Server and Tools Division. Earlier in her career, Kress held various finance positions at Texas Instruments.
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In 2022, Nvidia was worth less than $400 billion. By 2024, it had crossed $3 trillion in market value. In 2025 and 2026, fueled by explosive demand for AI infrastructure, Nvidia surpassed the $5 trillion mark. The company has become pivotal to the AI industry, with its GPUs used by hyperscalers including Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta, as well as AI labs like OpenAI, startups, and governments.
“AI is no longer a nice-to-have. AI is now a necessity for enhancing productivity across all industries and roles,” Kress said on Nvidia’s May 20 earnings call. “This is propelling revenue acceleration across all layers of the AI stack, including energy, chips, infrastructure, models, and applications.”
For the quarter ended April 26, Nvidia reported record revenue of $81.6 billion, up 20% from the previous quarter and 85% from a year earlier. Free cash flow rose to $49 billion from $35 billion in the prior quarter, while GAAP gross margin held steady at 74.9%. Hyperscale revenue reached $38 billion, accounting for roughly half of Data Center revenue and growing 12% quarter over quarter.
Nvidia projects global AI infrastructure spending could reach $3 trillion to $4 trillion by the end of the decade, driven primarily by hyperscalers, AI companies, enterprises, and governments building large-scale AI systems and data centers.
“The chip landscape remains Nvidia’s world with everybody else paying rent as more sovereigns and enterprises wait in line for Nvidia’s chips,” Wedbush Securities analysts wrote in a May 20 investor note.
Kress also unveiled a new reporting structure. Nvidia will now split its business into two segments: Data Center and Edge Computing. Data Center is further broken into Hyperscale—sales to cloud giants and major internet companies—and ACIE, which captures AI cloud providers, industrial customers, and enterprises building their own AI infrastructure. Edge Computing covers PCs, gaming consoles, workstations, robotics, cars, and AI-powered cellular base stations.
In 2022, Kress told Fortune that when she started at Nvidia, it was the smallest company that she’d ever worked for. “It’s gotten quite large, but the focus is on how do you think about the future and make sure we’re ready for it to scale?” she said. “Some of the techniques and processes have to be transformed over time as the company scales.”
Kress is steering Nvidia’s finances through one of the most consequential growth periods in corporate history.
Explore the full 2026 Most Powerful Women list here.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com