Dive Brief:
- AI chip giant Nvidia has snapped up Intel veteran Scott Gawel, 55, to serve as its new chief accounting officer and principal accounting officer, effective May 4, according to a securities filing.
- Gawel’s appointment comes days after the Santa Clara, California-based company’s current CAO, Donald Robertson, told the company he would retire from the role, also on May 4, according to the filing. Robertson will stay at the company as a vice president, finance, to work on various unnamed projects until July 1, the filing states.
- Gawel’s compensation will include an annual base salary of $800,000 and two “new hire equity grants” of restricted stock units with a combined target value of $12.9 million that will vest over a four-year period, according to the filing. Nvidia also agreed to indemnify Gawel against certain expenses that come as a result of “being made a party to certain actions, suits, proceedings,” that may stem from being a company officer.
Dive Insight:
Gawel’s salary is just below the $893,739 salary received by Nvidia’s CFO Colette Kress in fiscal 2025, according to the company’s most recent proxy filing. Kress’ total compensation last year was $21.4 million, composed largely of $19.8 million in stock awards as well as her base salary.
Gawel joins the graphics processing units developer from Intel, another tech giant that is a major player in the AI space, where he served as corporate VP and CAO from 2022 to 2026. He previously worked for over 18 years at Oracle, including holding the roles of corporate controller and assistant corporate controller, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Gawel has a bachelor’s degree in economics and accounting from California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo and started his career working at the Big Four firm EY for five years.
Robertson is stepping down after serving as CAO since June of 2019, according to his LinkedIn profile.
The leadership changeup comes a little over a month after the company hosted its annual GTC event, at which it touted a range of new products positioned to run AI models more efficiently. The new products were revealed as customers have asked for improved chips for inference computing rather than training, The Wall Street Journal reported.
After the event, Morningstar analysts raised their fair value estimate for the stock to $260 from $240 “based on an improved near-term forecast, even as we taper our long-term growth estimates,” the March 18 report led by Senior Equity Analyst Brian Colello stated. The report also noted that Nvidia forecast $1 trillion of cumulative revenue from Blackwell and Rubin AI products from 2025-2027.
“At the event, we were most impressed with the buzz around OpenClaw and Nvidia’s support behind the nascent, open-source agentic AI product,” the report states. “Agentic AI appears to be well on its way.”
