Who can replace Jensen Huang as Nvidia CEO? These four names are buzzing in AI circles.

By Britney Nguyen and Hannah Pedone

As Nvidia's board seeks a new CEO, experts say that person will need a rare balance of tech vision and business savvy

Nvidia's board has a rather large black leather jacket to fill now that Jensen Huang has resigned as CEO, and both tech experts and Wall Street seem to agree that Huang's ability to make bold bets while keeping investors appeased will be hard to replace.

Huang "was the visionary who bet the company on accelerated computing years before the market saw it, and he set the tone for the whole AI buildout," Ben Bajarin, CEO of independent tech-research firm Creative Strategies, said in a post on Substack.

Before assuming its central role in the artificial-intelligence boom, Nvidia (NVDA) made its name in the gaming world with its graphics processing units. In the 2010s, the company realized the parallel processing power of the chips could serve the burgeoning field of generative AI, which eventually took off with the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT in November 2022.

Following Huang's resignation Thursday morning from the role he'd held for more than 30 years, Nvidia's board of directors announced that Colette Kress, the company's chief financial officer, would take over on an interim basis as it launches a search for a permanent replacement. Kress is widely seen as a candidate for that position.

Kress has served as CFO since 2013, and has previous experience at analog chipmaker Texas Instruments (TXN). She also served in CFO roles for business divisions at Microsoft (MSFT) and Cisco Systems (CSCO).

Nvidia's board said it will consider candidates from inside and outside of the company.

One of those insiders, Ian Buck, has been touted by some analysts, including Bajarin, as a potential candidate. Buck has been at Nvidia since 2004 and heads its hyperscale and high-performance computing division.

Buck is widely credited as the inventor of Nvidia's Compute Unified Device Architecture, or CUDA, software, which made the company "a computing platform and not only a chip company," Bajarin wrote. The software platform has allowed developers to use Nvidia's GPUs for general-processing tasks beyond their original graphics rendering purpose.

From his position, Buck has made relationships with Nvidia's major data-center customers, Bajarin noted, and has gained knowledge of the chip supply chain.

"An internal successor who already owns the roadmap and the customer relationships is the strongest signal of continuity the board can send, in our opinion," Bajarin said.

Courtney Olujobi, a principal at quantitative-investment firm Moon Pursuit Capital, shared a similar view that Buck's role in the CUDA platform "is particularly relevant" given Nvidia's competitive edge over its chip rivals has come from developers building software around its hardware.

Buck's relationships with Nvidia's hyperscaler customers also mean he has knowledge of "how technical decisions translate into purchasing commitments," Olujobi told MarketWatch.

That combination will matter for investors, he said, because whoever leads Nvidia will need to be able to see where technology is going way before customers can.

William Blair analyst Sebastien Naji also pointed to Buck as a "credible" internal candidate for the top spot, in a note to clients, as well as Groq founder Jonathan Ross, given his expertise as one of the architects of Google's (GOOGL) (GOOG) custom chip project. Ross joined Nvidia in December as part of its chip-licensing deal with his company.

Kress and Buck "bring two very different strengths to the table, and Nvidia needs both right now," James Vrachas, an executive director at Post Oak Group, told MarketWatch.

From her CFO post, Kress has led Nvidia through its rapid growth, he said, and in addition to understanding Wall Street's expectations for the business, she's responsible for the company's relationships with its institutional investors.

"At a time when confidence and stability are critical, that experience matters," he said.

On the other hand, Buck understands the technology that has propelled Nvidia to much of its success, Vrachas said.

Ideally, investors will want a leader for Nvidia who can balance both Wall Street's demands and drive innovation, he said, pointing to Huang's ability do so.

"Ultimately, investors aren't just looking for a new CEO," Vrachas said. "They're looking for reassurance that Nvidia can maintain its competitive advantage and continue growing without the person who helped build it into what it is today."

Meanwhile, Sentara Capital founder Will Allen told MarketWatch the next Nvidia leader "must come from outside the company and needs credibility in the chip industry." Unlike an external candidate, Allen said an internal hire would invite questions over what they knew about Huang's indiscretions and when.

In his view, that could come in the form of Arm Holdings (ARM) CEO Rene Haas, who had previously worked at Nvidia from 2006 to 2013, and therefore "understands their culture." Additionally, Haas already heads "a large and very successful company in the chip industry."

Shay Boloor, chief market strategist at the Futurum Group, also pointed to Haas as a strong external candidate given Nvidia's new central-processing-units business. The company's CPUs, which have seen a surge in demand from agentic AI, are built on Arm's chip architecture, he said in emailed comments shared with MarketWatch. Therefore, Haas would understand Nvidia's growing opportunity there, according to Boloor.

Arm declined to comment on the matter.

Still, the worry remains that Nvidia could lose its "creative, relationship-driven dealmaking" that has allowed it to lead the market and rise to become, at one point, the most valuable company in the world, William Blair's Naji said.

"Huang was the driving force behind Nvidia's creative financing," he said, pointing to its stakes in AI leaders OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI.

And despite shortages throughout the AI supply chain, including for memory chips and optics, Huang had been able to secure "leading allocations" through his business savvy, Naji said.

Nvidia's existing contracts for those components will remain regardless of who takes over as CEO, he said, but the risk lies ahead when it's time to make new deals. Additionally, Nvidia is already facing threats to its dominance in the AI chip market, and could see even more competition from the likes of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Broadcom (AVGO), according to Naji.

-Britney Nguyen -Hannah Pedone

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11-12-26 1757ET