Nvidia’s board is deciding who could run the company without Jensen Huang, and a short list of names has started to form. Chief financial officer Colette Kress is the leading option for an interim role, after Semafor reported that some directors favour appointing her if Huang is removed. Ian Buck, the Nvidia vice president who invented CUDA, is the internal engineer most often named for the longer term.
Outside the company, Apple’s chief hardware officer Johny Srouji and Arm chief executive Rene Haas have both been mentioned as possible candidates for the permanent job.
The board has not announced a decision on Huang’s future. Nvidia’s directors met late on Wednesday 11 November, according to Reuters, and Bloomberg reported that the board is working with an outside search firm to identify potential replacements. Nvidia has not commented on the succession talk, and Huang remains chief executive while the investigation led by former federal prosecutor Joon Kim continues. Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and has led it ever since, so any successor would be the first new chief executive in the company’s 33 years.
Colette Kress is the safe pair of hands, not the long-term answer
Kress has been Nvidia’s chief financial officer since 2013, after senior finance roles at Cisco and Microsoft. Investors know her well from more than a decade of earnings calls, in which she has explained Nvidia’s rise from a graphics card maker to the world’s most valuable chip company. That familiarity counts for a lot in a crisis, especially with quarterly results due next week. She would also be the first woman to lead the company.
Her limits as a permanent leader are just as clear. Kress does not have an engineering background, which is why reports describe her as a caretaker rather than a long-term successor. Nvidia’s identity rests on its chips and software, and its next permanent leader will be expected to set the technical direction as Huang has done for three decades. An interim chief executive would buy the board time to run a proper search, which appears to be exactly what it has started doing.
The permanent job points to an engineer, inside Nvidia or out
Buck is the strongest internal candidate in most analyst notes. He is Nvidia’s vice president of hyperscale and high-performance computing, and he invented CUDA, the software platform that made Nvidia’s GPUs the standard for AI research. That gives him credibility with developers and investors alike, which few people at the company can match. Reuters reported that many analysts see Buck and Kress as the two likeliest short-term candidates, while Futurum analyst Shay Boloor noted that Nvidia has “no obvious second-in-command”, according to ABC News.
Srouji would be the most ambitious outside choice. As Apple’s chief hardware officer, he reports to chief executive John Ternus, and his iPhone chip work since 2008 became the foundation of Apple silicon. Before Apple, he held senior processor design roles at Intel and IBM. His name has appeared in reports in South Korea, although those reports have not said who raised it, and neither Apple nor Srouji has commented.
Haas is the other outside name, and he would not be a stranger. Arm’s chief executive spent seven years at Nvidia running its computing products business, before joining Arm in 2013. Those years would give him a working knowledge of Nvidia’s culture and its customers. He has since led the British chip designer through its return to the stock market in 2023. Analysts have floated him as an external option, but there is no report that the board has approached him.
The crisis has also pulled in some of tech’s biggest names. Elon Musk said it would be an “honor” to hire Huang, according to Bloomberg, as Nvidia’s board met to consider its founder’s future. It is not the first time Musk has weighed in, after his “you’re an asset” joke became the biggest meme of the Huang affair earlier this week.
Nvidia has five days to settle this before its earnings call
Investors want the board to make its decision quickly. Nvidia shares fell more than 8% in after-hours trading on Wednesday as the reports spread, and Asian stocks tumbled on Thursday as investors waited for the board. Some rivals moved the other way, with AMD and Broadcom shares rising as traders weighed the uncertainty at Nvidia. The first two sessions after Huang’s affair letter had already wiped about $452 billion off Nvidia’s value. Nvidia’s third-quarter call on Tuesday 17 November, at 5 pm ET or 22:00 UTC, is now likely to be dominated by questions about leadership rather than demand for AI chips.
For PC gamers, the stakes are more personal than a share price. Nvidia is still the company behind GeForce, and Huang has been the face of every major graphics card launch since the late 1990s, leather jacket and all. A new chief executive would not change products already in the pipeline, but would set priorities at a company that now earns most of its money from AI data centres. Those priorities already feel close to home this week, with a report that Nvidia has cancelled a 24GB RTX 5080 as memory costs rise.
Inside Nvidia, staff have largely backed their founder, with 88% of employees in a Blind poll saying he should stay, although that survey closed before the second affair report. The board, however, answers to shareholders rather than staff. Its independent directors opened the week by hiring Joon Kim and Wachtell Lipton, according to the board’s own statement, and by Wednesday were reported to be preparing to remove Huang. Under Nvidia’s bylaws, a majority of its 11 directors can dismiss the chief executive with or without cause.
