Nvidia interim CEO Colette Kress once tried to rein in the company's highest-risk business bet.

Nvidia reportedly appointed its veteran Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress as interim CEO on Thursday, thrusting the finance veteran into the task of steering the company through a turbulent storm of uncertainty triggered by the sudden resignation of former CEO Jensen Huang. Kress, 59, joined Nvidia in 2013, when the company was still an obscure gaming chip supplier. Although she played an important role in guiding the company's rise and its central position in the AI economy, she was not the one making the major decisions, according to people familiar with the matter. Huang held absolute control over Nvidia and had never established a clear succession plan. A person who knows Kress said that whenever the two disagreed, Huang would often "steamroll" her views. Still, Kress is well known in the investment community. She is the only executive other than Huang who regularly speaks on Nvidia's quarterly earnings calls. The next earnings call is scheduled for next Tuesday. Compared with Huang, Kress may adopt a more conservative approach. As finance chief, she has sometimes raised objections to deals Huang pushed for. According to people familiar with the matter, these included a proposed deal in which Nvidia would provide up to $25 billion in credit guarantees to OpenAI, aimed at enabling OpenAI to fill 8 gigawatts of data center space with Nvidia's latest-generation chips. In August, Nvidia ultimately split the deal in two and has so far committed to providing only about $10 billion in credit guarantees for the first part. According to the people, in recent months, as data center project delays and canceled cloud computing deals made the picture of the AI boom increasingly complicated, Kress focused her efforts on finding ways to ensure that Nvidia's financial risk would not be overly concentrated in a small number of companies. Before joining Nvidia, Kress served for three years as CFO of a Cisco business unit and worked at Microsoft for more than a decade.