Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Abercrombie & Fitch chief executive officer Fran Horowitz called the economy "uncertain," Citigroup is looking to open its doors to smaller businesses, and Colette Kress helps lead Nvidia to record earnings. Have a great Thursday!
- Big gains. Investors have been looking forward to Nvidia’s second quarter earnings report with the breathless anticipation typically reserved for your home team’s long-shot Super Bowl victory.
And the company didn’t disappoint. In what some called the “most important tech earnings in years,” it beat expectations, reporting revenue of $30 billion—more than double what it reported this time last year. Though the company’s stock fell on the news of minor production snags, it is up more than 150% year-to-date, and its market value is only bested by the likes of Microsoft and Apple. Investors and analysts watched closely for a signal of the health of the broader AI market.
It’s a remarkable story, made only more so by the fact that few outside of the tech and investing spheres were paying attention to the company a year or so ago. And though CEO Jensen Huang is the figurehead of the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker, a not insignificant share of its success over the past decade can also be credited to CFO Colette Kress. In fact, Kress has been the key to turning Nvidia into Wall Street’s hottest stock, my colleague Sheryl Estrada recently reported.
"The CFO leadership at Nvidia from Colette Kress has been instrumental in Nvidia’s success with Wall Street, and is key to Jensen’s vision," Dan Ives, managing partner at Wedbush Securities, told Estrada. “She is extremely well respected both internally at Nvidia and across the tech industry."
When she joined, the company was known mainly by gamers who were wowed by its graphics processing chips. Now, it’s an artificial intelligence darling, producing the chips that power AI services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and one of the most valuable companies in the world. Kress herself is one of the most influential women in tech.
Kress was "advised" to join the company in 2013 by her then 8- and 10-year-old sons, according to an interview she gave last year with the Israeli financial newspaper Globes. With prior stints at Cisco and Microsoft, moving to Nvidia—a much smaller company at the time—was anything but the logical next step; but Huang persuaded Kress to come aboard as the company began to position itself as a key player in the growing AI industry.
"When I started at Nvidia, it was the smallest company that I’d ever worked for," Kress told Fortune back in 2022. "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?"
By all accounts, Kress and Nvidia were more than ready.
Alicia Adamczyk
alicia.adamczyk@fortune.com
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