NVIDIA Corporation
Leadership History
3 leaders · 1993 to present
Jensen Huang is the CEO of NVIDIA, in the role since 1993.
| Name | Role | From | To | Years in role |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Colette Kress | Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer | 2013 | Present | 13 |
| Jensen Huang | CEO | 1993 | Present | 33 |
| Chris Malachowsky | Co-Founder | 1993 | 2024 | 31 |
NVIDIA Corporation, based in Santa Clara, California, started in 1993 as a PC graphics chip company and is now the largest supplier of AI computing infrastructure. Its GPUs, NVLink and InfiniBand/Ethernet networking, and CUDA software sit inside most large AI training and inference clusters at Microsoft, Meta, Google Cloud, Amazon, Oracle and AI labs such as OpenAI. In fiscal 2026 it had about 42,000 employees and $215.9B in revenue. In September 2026 it was the world's most valuable listed company, worth roughly $5.45 trillion. NVIDIA was founded in April 1993 at a Denny's diner in San Jose/Sunnyvale, California, by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem to pioneer 3D graphics acceleration, inventing the GPU in 1999 and building the CUDA accelerated computing architecture that powers the modern artificial intelligence revolution from Santa Clara.
Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
2013 – Present
13 years (current)
Kress oversees NVIDIA's financial reporting, guidance and capital returns, including the dividend increase in May 2026 and the buyback authorization increases in 2026.
She has been CFO through NVIDIA's growth from about $4B of annual revenue to $215.9B in FY2026, and she leads its quarterly earnings communication with investors.
CEO
1993 – Present
33 years (current)
Jensen Huang has led NVIDIA from its 1993 founding through PC graphics, CUDA, data-center acceleration, and generative AI infrastructure. His defining decisions were to recover from the NV1 misstep, define the GPU category with GeForce 256, fund CUDA in 2006, pursue deep learning before it became mainstream, acquire Mellanox in 2020, and push Blackwell and Rubin as full AI factory platforms. He also kept NVIDIA fabless, choosing architectural control and ecosystem depth over owning leading-edge manufacturing. The measurable outcome is notable: FY2026 revenue reached $215.9 billion, net income reached $120.1 billion, and Data Center revenue reached $193.7 billion. Huang's era turned NVIDIA from a graphics-chip designer into an AI infrastructure platform.
Huang has been CEO for more than 33 years, which makes him one of the longest-serving founder-CEOs in the industry. Under him NVIDIA bet early on CUDA and deep learning, bought Mellanox for networking, and moved to a yearly architecture cadence. By September 2026 it had become the world's most valuable listed company.
Co-Founder
1993 – 2024
31 years
Co-founded Nvidia.
Chris Malachowsky co-founded Nvidia in 1993. As Senior Vice President of Engineering and Operations, he played a critical role in developing the early graphics processing architecture and establishing Nvidia's robust engineering supply chain.
The biggest risk is AI capex cyclicality, customer concentration, export controls, supply constraints, gross-margin pressure, and competition from custom silicon.
Jensen (Jen-Hsun) Huang is the Co-Founder, President, and CEO of NVIDIA. Born in Tainan, Taiwan, in 1963, Huang emigrated to the US as a child, earned electrical engineering degrees from Oregon State University (BS) and Stanford University (MS), and co-founded NVIDIA in 1993 at age 30, serving continuously for over 31 years as one of the longest-tenured and most celebrated tech CEOs in history.
In 2006, Jensen Huang mandated that every single NVIDIA GPU produced must include CUDA hardware logic, adding significant silicon cost and depressing corporate profit margins for nearly a decade; Wall Street heavily criticized the move, but it laid the foundational software ecosystem that enabled modern deep learning and the generative AI revolution.
Colette Kress serves as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of NVIDIA Corporation, having joined in 2013 from senior finance roles at Cisco and Microsoft. Kress has managed NVIDIA's historic revenue surge, gross margin expansion to ~75%, and multi-billion-dollar capital allocation strategies.
Jensen Huang maintains a famously flat organizational hierarchy with over 50 direct executive reports, zero 1-on-1 meetings, public company-wide problem-solving emails, and no rigid 5-year plans, operating with extreme agility and a culture of intellectual honesty where mistakes are dissected publicly to learn at speed.
Jensen Huang's signature black leather motorcycle jacket, black shirt, and black jeans became a well-known global tech trademark; Huang adopted the uniform to eliminate decision fatigue, focusing his mental energy entirely on engineering and corporate strategy.
Jay Puri serves as Executive Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations, having joined NVIDIA in 2005 from Sun Microsystems; Puri leads global sales, partner relations with cloud hyperscalers and server OEMs, and sovereign AI commercial engagements across 50+ countries.
Jensen Huang was named to TIME's 100 Most Influential People, received the Semiconductor Industry Association's Robert N. Noyce Award, was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest technology leaders of the 21st century.
Despite NVIDIA's trillion-dollar market valuation, Jensen Huang frequently repeats his early founding motto, 'Our company is thirty days from going out of business', to instill an enduring culture of urgency, humility, paranoia, and innovation that prevents corporate complacency.
Compare executive leadership tenures and strategic transitions
Explore NVIDIA
Core profile pages, founders and related research hubs for this company.