Nvidia‘s new Interim Chief Executive Officer, Colette Kress, has spent six years presenting the chipmaker’s case for self-driving cars and robotaxis to investors, often in Jensen Huang’s own terms.
Over the same period, she oversaw a reporting change that has made the car business harder to track.
Nvidia’s board accepted Huang’s resignation as President, Chief Executive Officer and director on Wednesday, November 11, “effective immediately,” the company said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday.
Kress is Nvidia’s Chief Financial Officer since 2013. She will hold both jobs while the board searches for a permanent successor among internal and external candidates. Director Harvey C. Jones became the company’s first-ever Chair.
“We will continue advancing the work that has made NVIDIA a leader in accelerated computing and AI, and execute on the opportunities ahead,” Kress said in the statement. It did not mention cars, robotaxis or physical AI.
Her message to employees, which has circulated publicly, did not details either. “You will hear more from leadership in the coming days about our future together,” she wrote, adding that Nvidia would hold a company meeting on November 18, the day after the earnings call, according to leaked internal emails.
Her first test comes on Tuesday, November 17, when Nvidia reports third-quarter results and holds its earnings call at 2 p.m. Pacific Time.
From Design Wins to Robotaxis
Kress’s earlier remarks on cars were mostly about chip contracts. In August 2020 she called the Mercedes-Benz deal to put Nvidia’s full self-driving stack across its fleet from 2024 “a [transformational] announcement for the automotive industry,” according to a transcript of that call.
At Nvidia’s 2021 investor day, she said Nvidia had “over $8 billion in automotive design win pipeline through fiscal year 2027” and expected “a revenue inflection point somewhere in the timeframe of calendar 2023 and 2024.”
Kress said the Mercedes software revenue share, with software content “potentially in thousands of dollars per vehicle,” “could be a multibillion revenue opportunity for both Mercedes and NVIDIA.”
A year later, at the 2022 investor day, she put the pipeline at $11 billion over six years, “reflecting our great momentum with new NEVs, traditional OEMs, truck makers, and robotaxis,” and said revenue would “hit an inflection point in the second half of this year.”
In August 2022 she said, “We believe Q2 was an inflection point for our automotive revenue.” The pipeline reached $14 billion in May 2023.
The emphasis later shifted to Nvidia’s data centers.
In May 2024 she said Nvidia had “supported Tesla’s expansion of their training AI cluster to 35,000 H100 GPUs,” and predicted that automotive would be its “largest enterprise vertical within Data Center” that year. In February 2025 she put that vertical at about $5 billion for the fiscal year.
The Robotaxi Case
Her most expansive robotaxi claim came last February.
“Robotaxi rides are growing exponentially with commercial fleets from Waymo, Tesla, Uber, WeRide and Zoox, and many others are expected to scale from thousands of vehicles in 2025 to millions over the next decade, creating a market poised to generate hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue,” she said. She added that the expansion “will demand orders of magnitude more compute.”
On the same call she said the first passenger car running Alpamayo, the reasoning AI models Nvidia unveiled at CES in January, “will be on the road soon in the new Mercedes-Benz CLA.” Tesla shares fell more than 5% in early afternoon trading on the day Nvidia announced the open-source driving models.
A year ago, she said Nvidia was partnering with Uber “to scale the world’s largest level 4-ready autonomous fleet” on its Hyperion robotaxi architecture.
“Our partnership with Uber will power the robotaxi fleet across nearly 30 cities and 4 continents by 2028,” she said last May. Nvidia has also announced robotaxi plans in Europe with Uber and Bolt.
‘Do We Want to Build Cars? No’
Kress has described Nvidia’s role as a supplier of compute and software, not a carmaker. At a Morgan Stanley conference in March 2025, she was asked whether Nvidia wanted to build robots, and answered with cars as the model.
“Do we want to build cars? No. But we do want to be both a partner in terms of the compute that is going to be necessary, the design of that, but also the software platform that will be needed,” she said. “You’ve got a brain in the data center. You’ve got a brain inside of the car.”
At a JPMorgan event during CES in January 2026, she said the Mercedes partnership was paying off. “We are earning definitely revenue from our work in terms of Mercedes, as well as many others that are using our platform,” Kress said, describing eight years of work on the carmaker’s self-driving system.
Mercedes has since added Wayve as a third AI driving partner alongside Nvidia and Momenta.
Harder to Track
Nvidia’s in-car revenue remains small next to its data center business. Automotive revenue, which Nvidia said includes only in-car compute, was $604 million in the quarter to January, up 6% from a year earlier.
In-car revenue crossed $1 billion for the first time in fiscal 2024, at $1.09 billion, rose 55% to about $1.69 billion in fiscal 2025 and reached about $2.35 billion in fiscal 2026, based on her quarterly figures. That was 1.09% of Nvidia’s $215.9 billion in revenue for the fiscal year ended January 25, down from 1.8% in fiscal 2024.
In February 2024 she said the automotive vertical’s data center revenue had “exceeded $1 billion last year.”
Huang told Automotive News at Nvidia’s GTC conference in March that he did not care that automotive was such a small share of revenue.
“Nvidia’s CUDA business used to be 0 percent of our business, and it was 90 percent of our cost,” he said, referring to the company’s parallel computing software platform. “Any sane person would have given up on that, but none of you would be in this room right now.”
Kress has not said publicly whether she shares that view.
Since May, Nvidia no longer reports it separately. Kress announced that automotive had been folded into a new Edge Computing segment alongside PCs, game consoles, workstations, base stations and robotics.
The segment posted $7.2 billion in revenue in the quarter to July, according to Nvidia’s CFO commentary.
On her last call as CFO alone, in August, the only car figure she gave came from the data center side. “On a trailing 12-month basis, on-prem revenue in the automotive vertical reached $8 billion,” she said. She did not mention robotaxis on that call.
In May she had put physical AI, the category that includes cars and robots, at more than $9 billion in revenue over the previous 12 months.
Her Own Caveats
Kress has also flagged the limits of the bet. “Cars have a much longer refresh cycle than PCs and servers, so the auto opportunity will take longer to realize,” she said at the 2022 investor day.
In August 2022 she said auto growth would weigh on margins. “Auto is below our company average, and that will tend to offset some of those upper bound things that we will see in terms of data center,” she said.
In May 2023 she said growth had moderated because “some NEV customers in China are adjusting their production schedules to reflect slower than expected demand growth.”
Customers She Has Named
The carmakers Kress has cited in the past two years are mostly Western, Japanese and Korean. They include Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, which is building next-generation cars on DRIVE Orin, and General Motors. Hyundai Motor Group, which deepened its Nvidia alliance in June, is also on the list, along with Aurora and Continental for driverless trucks.
Chinese carmakers have largely dropped out of her remarks. She last named Nio in November 2022, and XPeng in May 2024, when it was among DRIVE Thor design wins. Nio’s chip unit now pitches its own processor as a cheaper alternative to Nvidia’s.
Last year, she mentioned BYD only as a user of Nvidia’s AI factories.
Next Week’s Call
Kress has referred to automotive on every Nvidia earnings call since November 2020, 24 in all, though on some only in passing, as one of several key industries.
Tuesday’s call will be Kress’s first as Interim CEO. Huang usually followed her prepared remarks with his own and took most strategy questions. The call will show whether robotaxis and the Uber timeline stay in her script.
Analysts flagged the leadership risk before the announcement. Oppenheimer analyst Rick Schafer downgraded Nvidia to ‘Perform’ from ‘Outperform’ on Thursday, saying, “We see massive shoes to fill and no obvious successor,” according to Price Target.
Price Target, a sister publication of EV, archives Wall Street analysts’ research on the electric vehicle, artificial intelligence and semiconductor sectors.
Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said on Wednesday that hiring Huang would be “an honor.” Nvidia shares closed down 4.3% at $166.19 on Thursday.
