If NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA.US) were to replace Jensen Huang, who would be his successor?

Title context: If NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA.US) were to replace Jensen Huang, who would be his successor? Text: People familiar with the matter said that the NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA.US) board met on Wednesday local time in the United States to discuss whether to remove Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang the world's largest AI processor supplier is embroiled in reports of two extramarital affairs involving its leader, with one of the women reportedly suspected of espionage for China. NVIDIA Corporation did not respond to a request for comment on the meeting. According to reports, the company has hired an external headhunter to find the next CEO. Semafor, citing people familiar with the matter, reported that some directors favor appointing Chief Financial Officer Kress as interim CEO, but the board has not yet made a decision. Prediction market Polymarket shows an 83% probability that Huang will resign or be removed before the end of the year; among successor odds, Buck ranks first and Kress second though the market is very small. Musk said on X the same day that hiring Jensen Huang "would be an honor." Reports earlier said NVIDIA Corporation was preparing to oust Jensen Huang, and media disclosed his relationship with a direct subordinate, escalating the crisis. The financial consequences of these reports are already visible: this week NVIDIA Corporation's market value evaporated by about US$600 billion, and it is currently the world's second-most valuable company. Why there is no "number two" Before discussing succession, one must first understand why this is so difficult. Jensen Huang has never designated a successor. He single-handedly founded the company that started with gaming graphics cards, transformed it into an AI computing machine, and built it into one of the world's most valuable companies. According to prior analysis by institutions such as Bernstein, about 60 senior executives report directly to Jensen Huang, and he himself is closely involved in day-to-day operations meaning the company has no obvious second-in-command. Bernstein analysts' statement was later widely quoted: "Jensen Huang is NVIDIA Corporation, and NVIDIA Corporation is Jensen Huang." Anna Wu, founder of Sydney-based Floodlines Research, put it this way: "Jensen Huang is the rock star of this industry. He is high-profile and outspoken, and is fused with the NVIDIA Corporation brand. Such a leader is extremely difficult to replace." For this reason, the market has divided candidates into two lists: one to stabilize the situation temporarily, and one to take over for the long term. And NVIDIA Corporation's family-oriented employment structure daughter Madison oversees the Omniverse software business, son Spencer is in the Siasun Robot&Automation division, and son-in-law participates in emerging cloud customer cooperation both deepens the impression that "he is the company" and makes outside succession speculation more likely to fall on him. Kress: the obvious choice to stabilize the situation The simplest solution is to elevate the person who appears alongside Jensen Huang on quarterly earnings calls: Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress. She is 59 this year and joined NVIDIA Corporation in 2013. She previously held long-term roles at Microsoft Corporation, Cisco Systems, Inc. and Texas Instruments Incorporated, and has served as CFO for 13 years. The company's revenue growth, gross margin, data center business and earnings guidance have historically been explained by her to Wall Street. Semafor reported that some directors favor appointing her as interim CEO. Josh Gilbert, chief analyst at trading platform eToro, judged: "Kress is the obvious choice to stabilize the situation. She has been the finance chief for 13 years and has appeared alongside Jensen Huang at every earnings call. She is a familiar and credible voice for the market at a moment when trust and continuity are urgently needed." But he immediately separated two things: "A formal appointment is another matter. NVIDIA Corporation's moat comes from technology, and when the board selects a long-term leader, it will most likely want an engineer in that chair." Kress's resume is concentrated in finance, and she may not be a natural successor in technological innovation and product strategy; she is better understood as a transitional figure suited to maintaining financial and capital market stability. Buck: the first engineer on the long-term list First on the long-term candidate list is Ian Buck, about 49 this year, who joined NVIDIA Corporation in 2004 and was one of the principal creators of the CUDA software system CUDA expanded GPUs from graphics processors into a general-purpose computing platform, and is the foundation of the later AI training and inference business, as well as the reason developers are locked into NVIDIA Corporation chips. He holds a doctorate from Stanford University (his doctoral research laid the foundation for his AI software work at NVIDIA Corporation), and is currently Vice President of Hyperscale and High-Performance Computing, responsible for hardware and software products for hyperscale AI customers, working with Microsoft Corporation, Alphabet Inc. Class C, Amazon.com, Inc., Meta and OpenAI. A Business Insider report in November listed him as a potential long-term successor worth watching. Shay Boloor, chief market strategist at Futurum Equities, said: "If a handover must take place, Buck, with his experience in co-creating CUDA and leading the hyperscale business, is the strongest long-term internal candidate." A footnote for reference: just this week, when the Starmind space computing project jointly developed by SpaceX and NVIDIA Corporation made its public appearance, it was Buck himself who endorsed the architecture to the media he told reporters that SpaceXAI "is taking this architecture from massive AI factories to the new frontier of orbital computing." He is already one of the company's external technical faces. But what he is really worried about is the next decade. "Jensen Huang is not just NVIDIA Corporation's CEO; he is the person who has always identified where computing is heading," Boloor said. That sentence points to the real difficulty of succession arrangements: what the successor must take over is not day-to-day management authority, but the judgment on technological direction. Other internal and external names There are two other directions internally. Potential candidates include 32-year veteran Jeff Fisher; Jensen Huang's two children, Madison and Spencer, are both company executives, but there is widespread doubt externally about whether they can take over. Armina Rosenberg, co-founder of Minotaur Capital, which holds NVIDIA Corporation shares, offered another idea: first have a senior core team serve as interim leaders, or even adopt a co-CEO structure Kress stabilizing the business and finance, and Buck responsible for products and technology. She stressed that this is only an investor's idea, not a company plan. On the external list, the most discussed is Arm CEO Rene Haas. He worked at NVIDIA Corporation for seven years early in his career and is very familiar with the semiconductor industry. A banker engaged in chip deals said Haas combines industry prominence and semiconductor experience, making him "the most logically reasonable." Some media also mentioned AMD CEO Lisa Su: AMD's revenue rose sharply during her tenure, but the competitive relationship between the two companies would complicate a move, and her family relationship with Jensen Huang is another obstacle. Semafor reported that Apple Inc. hardware chief Johny Srouji the leader of Apple Inc.'s in-house chip system (the A series and M series) is also under consideration. What to watch next is not just names Whoever the candidate is, the market has more than one question to answer. Dec Mullarkey of SLC Management put it bluntly: the finance chief can explain the performance numbers, but the market will also require the company to explain what changes will occur in governance arrangements how the investigation will end, whether the board structure will be adjusted, and how Jensen Huang's role will be defined. The timing is also crowded: NVIDIA Corporation is scheduled to release quarterly results on November 17, with prior guidance of US$108 billion in revenue and year-on-year growth of nearly 90%; on November 18, Jensen Huang is required to attend a closed-door briefing with three House committees. With an earnings call and a briefing bracketing a leadership-change suspense, this may be the most unusual week since the company went public. And the market will not wait until that week to start pricing it in. On November 10, on the day when US October CPI exceeded expectations and raised rate-hike expectations, NVIDIA Corporation's stock fell another 5.47%, and its market value briefly fell below US$4 trillion; of the roughly US$600 billion in market value evaporated this week, the scandal and leadership-change reports were the main incremental factors after AI trading sentiment. Conclusion Putting the two lists together, the real disagreement in this succession discussion is not about people, but about the definition of the role: what an interim CEO needs is market trust, and that candidate has converged on Kress; what a long-term CEO needs is technological judgment, and the candidate has converged on Buck, but even the analyst most optimistic about him admits that he can solve "extremely difficult technical problems," yet may not possess Jensen Huang's sense for the direction of the computing industry. The 83% probability on Polymarket of departure within the year is less a pricing of whether Jensen Huang stays or goes than a pricing of "whether the board dares to act during earnings week." And before that, every vague statement in board meeting minutes will be treated by the market as information to trade on.