Who replaces Jensen Huang?
He co-founded the company in 1993, has been its only chief executive since, and built it so completely around himself that succession always felt like a question for some distant year. On November 8, the chipmaker’s board opened an independent investigation following reports that Huang, 63, had been the target of a foreign intelligence effort. The New York Times had reported on October 29 that Alice Huang (no relation), a former executive at Singapore-based Nvidia customer Megaspeed, sought to cultivate close ties with him, and both the Times and the Financial Times reported that US intelligence agencies suspect she was passing information to Beijing. In an email to staff on November 8, Huang admitted to the affair. The board said it still had confidence in him, and on November 10 it hired Joon H. By November 11, the mood had turned. Directors met late into the night, shares fell more than 9% in after-hours trading, and Bloomberg reported that the board is working with an outside firm to explore replacements. Reports that directors favour her as interim CEO, her 13 years as the company’s public financial voice and the board’s need to steady investors all point the same way.
He had 55 direct reports in 2024 and 36 by late 2025, and he skips one-on-one meetings so that every leader hears the same thing at the same time. Because everyone around him had seen how he thinks, huang always argued that Nvidia did not need a formal succession plan. The New York Times reported that Huang had also been in a relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of healthcare and one of his direct reports. Minutes later, The Wall Street Journal reported that the board was preparing to force him out. At the time of writing, the company has not announced a decision. If the board does move, the first name announced is most likely to be Kress.
Asked about succession, he has said there will “never be one like me,” while arguing that the dozens of executives around him could each run a company of their own because they have watched him make every decision. Nvidia has never had to think seriously about who comes after Jensen Huang. That year may have arrived this week. China has dismissed the allegations as a smear. Kim, a former acting US attorney for the Southern District of New York, at law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to lead the probe. Under the company’s bylaws, a majority of directors can replace the CEO without cause. The harder part is finding the name that goes in his place. Jensen Huang runs one of the flattest structures in big tech. The permanent job will take a longer search, and on current signals Buck is the insider best placed for it, possibly after a spell sharing the interim role with Kress. The board is about to find out whether he was right. You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.
Kress has been chief financial officer since 2013. Before that she was CFO of Cisco’s business technology and operations finance organisation, and spent 13 years at Microsoft, the last four as CFO of its Server and Tools division, after starting out in finance at Texas Instruments. After Huang, she is the executive investors know best, the voice that has walked Wall Street through every quarter of the AI boom, including a fiscal 2026 in which revenue grew 65% to $215.9 billion. She already owns the numbers the market is holding the company to, including her own forecast of 70% revenue growth in fiscal 2028. The idea began at Stanford, where his PhD work produced Brook, an early attempt at running general-purpose code on graphics chips, and Nvidia hired him in 2004 to turn it into a product. In roughly 22 years at the company, he has risen to run hyperscale and high-performance computing, the heart of the data centre business that now brings in most of its revenue. Haas has been CEO of Arm since 2022, but before that he spent seven years at Nvidia, rising to run its computing products business. He took Arm public in 2023, and in March he moved it beyond licensing designs to selling its own chip for the first time, a data centre processor called the AGI CPU, with Meta as its first customer. Srouji led Apple’s in-house silicon programme from its first chip, the A4, in 2008, through to the processors that now power every iPhone and Mac, and his group went on to take over batteries, cameras, displays and Apple’s own cellular modems. The former Google CEO is the least conventional name here, and he already has a job: since March 2025 he has been CEO and controlling shareholder of rocket maker Relativity Space. Schmidt ran Google from 2001 to 2011, taking it from a fast-growing search company to a global giant, and has since spent years on AI and national security policy in Washington. In 2019 she started an MBA at London Business School and took a short AI course at MIT, and in 2020 she joined Nvidia as a marketing intern. Still, Nvidia’s 2026 proxy filing shows she is not an executive officer and does not report directly to her father. Caprez, 35, is a former Swiss national team ski racer who studied banking and finance at the University of Zurich and worked as a consultant at BCG before meeting Madison as a classmate at London Business School. He joined Nvidia in early 2024 as a corporate development manager, recruited with her help, and became vice president of global AI infrastructure growth in January. Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy has compared the moment to Intel’s 2018 removal of Brian Krzanich over a relationship with an employee, while noting that the chip plans are set years ahead, so the near-term risk to the business is limited.
Semafor reported that some directors favour naming her interim CEO.
Her growing number of public appearances with her father, including at the World Robot Conference in Beijing in August, has fed talk that she is being prepared for more, and former employees have said her influence reaches beyond her formal marketing role. Huang has said his children would have to earn the top job, and a jump from senior director to CEO would be a hard sell to shareholders already rattled by this week. The Information, which spoke to more than a dozen people who work with him, described Caprez as Huang’s “consigliere” and the company’s main contact for neoclouds, the newer cloud providers that rent out Nvidia GPUs. One colleague told the publication they imagined Huang was preparing Madison and Caprez for the next step.
That design kept Nvidia fast. It also means nobody below Huang has ever held a view of the whole company. The bench got thinner in August, when Jay Puri, who ran worldwide sales for two decades, retired and handed over to former Microsoft executive Nick Parker. These are the seven names now in the frame, two of them from Huang’s own family. The doubt is about what comes after. Her entire career has been in finance, and analysts do not see her as a natural successor to Huang’s role as the company’s technology visionary. As a stabiliser while the board searches, though, no one else is as ready. Buck created CUDA, the software platform that made Nvidia’s GPUs the default choice for AI work and that rivals still struggle to match. His job puts him in daily contact with Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta and OpenAI. Bettors on Polymarket have him as favourite for the permanent role. Some analysts have floated a shared interim arrangement, with Kress handling the finances and Buck the technology and customer relationships. The open question is whether a product leader who has never run the whole company can carry its public face the way Huang did. Few outsiders combine first-hand knowledge of how Huang operates with experience steering a listed chip company through that kind of change. Before Apple, he worked on processor design at Intel and IBM. In April, Apple made him chief hardware officer, placing its entire hardware engineering organisation under him as John Ternus prepared to take over from Tim Cook. His name has come up as a possible external successor. On paper, he offers what Kress cannot: an engineer who built a chip team from scratch inside a company that had never designed its own processors. The difficulty is timing. He has only just been handed the largest role of his career in Cupertino, which would make him hard to lure away. That last part matters now. A board dealing with a spy investigation, congressional pressure and nervous shareholders may value a calm, well-connected figure more than an engineer, at least for a while. Jensen Huang’s daughter took a route into technology unlike anyone else on this list. She trained at The Culinary Institute of America and Le Cordon Bleu, cooked in restaurant kitchens, then spent close to four years at LVMH marketing champagne brands such as Dom Pérignon and Veuve Clicquot. She is now senior director of product and technical marketing for the company’s physical AI platforms, including Omniverse, Cosmos and Isaac. The two married in Hawaii in September. Brookfield’s Sikander Rashid has recalled Huang telling him that if he wanted something done, he should talk to Nico. Less than three years at the company, though, would make his case harder to defend than anyone else’s here. D.A. Davidson’s Gil Luria was blunter, warning that the episode could force a transition the company is not prepared for. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney went the other way, saying that removing Huang would be as foolish as Apple’s firing of Steve Jobs.
He also brings something this moment needs, having testified before the US Congress on AI and advised the White House. Still, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld of the Yale School of Management, who advises chief executives and boards, has said he has heard Schmidt rumoured as a possible choice and that Schmidt “could step in tomorrow and do a very good job.
Futurum Group analyst Shay Boloor wrote on X that if he had to bet on an external pick, it would be Haas. Polymarket odds on him have since dropped sharply, and the timing works against him. Having just put Arm into competition with some of its own customers, Nvidia among them, he would be walking away from the biggest bet of his tenure.