Spying scandal at the chip giant. New CEO announced

It was revealed that Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Colette Kress, who was temporarily appointed at Nvidia, the world's most valuable chip manufacturer, to replace CEO Jensen Huang, who resigned after his two extramarital affairs were revealed, was criticized harshly by Huang in the summer.

Kress, who was named interim CEO yesterday, must now stabilize the tech giant as it faces both federal and internal investigations.

Huang resigned after his relationships with Chinese businesswoman Alice Huang, whom US intelligence suspected of being a spy, and company employee Kimberly Powell, were reported in the press.

The pressure on Huang, who apologized for cheating on his wife on Sunday, increased when The New York Times reported on the second relationship.

Nvidia management, which did not have a clear succession plan after the sudden departure of Huang, who had been working at the company he founded for 33 years, announced that it would evaluate internal and external candidates for the permanent CEO.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Huang called Kress and his senior finance team to his office in August and discussed the growing financing problem facing the company.

Huang, who interrupted Kress's presentation during the meeting, described the executive who is currently sitting in his seat as a "rabbit in headlights".

Huang said Kress was merely a “reporting CFO,” not someone who could help set strategy or make decisions.

During this period when the company was negotiating billions of dollars in loan guarantees, Huang's son-in-law Nico Caprez, who was promoted to vice president in January, and the other vice president, Raj Mirpuri, were offering financing to newly established cloud computing and data center companies in the hope that they would become long-term customers.

Stating that major cloud providers are trying to reduce their dependence on Nvidia by turning to alternative chips, Huang stated that the huge amount of chip plates and memory stock that the company has committed to purchase has come "like an avalanche".

Kress asked questions about which deals to choose, how to value guarantees and how to calculate return on investment in this program, which launched in the spring and offers credit support in exchange for a share of cloud companies' revenues.

Behind the scenes, Kress tried to rein in Caprez, Huang's son-in-law, according to people he worked with.

During this process, Nvidia held talks to provide financial support for the world's largest data center facility, which OpenAI will build in Ohio and fill with approximately $300 billion worth of Nvidia chips.

After The Wall Street Journal wrote on July 26 that Nvidia was considering $250 billion in support for the project, the company's shares lost 5 percent the next day and $250 billion was erased from its market value.

Sources familiar with the deal said Kress restructured the deal in the following weeks, halving Nvidia's initial financial commitment, and the parties signed the scaled-back deal on Aug. 17.

At Nvidia, which suspended some loan support agreements at the end of August, Kress advocated that the company provide loans to the artificial intelligence industry like a banker.

"We are aware of the scale of this support, and we know that some will call it countercyclical financing. We see it differently. The return on equity we will get from our invested capital will be excellent," Kress said in late August.

Nvidia's monthly average share multiplier, whose market value has increased from under $1 trillion in the last five years to $5.8 trillion in October, decreased from 23 in May to 16 in October.

The company, which carried out the largest share buyback in history to appease investors, began to turn down the financing taps in October.

At a conference in Berlin, Huang met with the CEOs of six major chip buyers and told the story of a soup seller in Japan who refused to sell all his soup to a single customer.

Huang told cloud computing executives, "He is a better business person than all of you," and said, "You do not determine the value of my products."