The most powerful woman in tech at this very moment is Colette Kress, the new interim CEO of Nvidia—but her predecessor, Jensen Huang, failed to mention her in a recent back-and-forth about the topic.
Earlier this fall, WIRED published a feature story exploring the complex topic of power for women working in an industry traditionally dominated by men. We questioned why Silicon Valley doesn’t have an Elon-esque or Jensen-like female hero (or villain) and determined that the rubric of power still looks different for women, whether they manage to hold significant financial capital, flex their political prowess, dictate cultural norms, or run intellectual circles around the industry.
We also determined there wasn’t just one singular impressive woman in tech, but a whole lot of them: Lisa Su, Gwynne Shotwell, Laurene Powell Jobs, and dozens more. Kress, then-CFO of Nvidia, was also given a nod.
As part of the reporting process, WIRED wanted to include the insights of a few established men in Silicon Valley. So we emailed Huang directly to ask for his thoughts.
He responded that “[Meta’s] Dina Powell, [Google’s] Ruth Porat” came to mind, because he “see[s] them when I’m in DC.” After some prompting, Huang also agreed that Shotwell, the president and COO of SpaceX, was impressive.
Notably, Huang didn’t mention the highest-ranking woman executive in his own company, someone who joins him on nearly every quarterly earnings call and has deeper knowledge of Nvidia’s finances than probably anyone else in the world. As CFO, Kress was an integral part of one of the most valuable companies in the world—one of the most powerful women in tech by any measure.
As interim CEO, Kress now sits atop the bedrock of the entire AI industry at its most precarious moment. The choices she makes while in this role will reverberate across tech, geopolitics, and the broader economy.
Regardless of whether that promotion becomes permanent, we now know just how powerful Kress is in the tech industry—and that her omission from Huang’s list was just one in a long line of bad calls.