Nvidia without Jensen Huang: who could replace the illustrious CEO?

While Jensen Huang has just resigned from his position as president of Nvidia, several personalities have already been mentioned to succeed him. From Colette Kress to Tim Cook, via Lisa Su, here are the potential candidates and the different scenarios considered. For his part, Elon Musk seems to be ready to hire Jensen Huang.

Jensen Huang, now ex-CEO of Nvidia, admitted to having had an extramarital affair with Alice Huang, director of the Singaporean company Megaspeed. The problem: she is suspected by Washington of being a spy in the service of China. Since this revelation, Trump has defended Jensen Huang, Beijing has denied it and the FBI has opened an investigation.

But the situation got even worse with new information: the Nvidia manager allegedly had another relationship, this time with an employee of the company. Nvidia's board of directors held a meeting this Thursday, November 12 to decide the fate of Nvidia's CEO, but it was ultimately Jensen Huang himself who submitted his resignation, effective immediately. Colette Kress, Nvidia's chief financial officer, will lead the company until a permanent successor is named. Bloomberg claims for its part that Nvidia used an external company to identify candidates for the position of CEO. But who could it be?

The first hypothesis, undoubtedly the most likely, would be that Nvidia chooses a successor among its own managers, already in position within the company. Colette Kress, NVIDIA's CFO since 2013 and currently responsible for running the company, could be permanently appointed to this position. Other candidates are also being considered: Ian Buck (engineer and AI specialist at Nvidia since 2004), Michael Kagan (technical director of NVIDIA) and Bryan Catanzaro (vice president of applied deep learning research).

Second hypothesis: Nvidia could call on a personality from outside the company to succeed Jensen Huang. In this case, the possibilities are multiple. Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a corporate governance expert and senior associate dean of leadership studies at the Yale School of Management, believes Nvidia could bring in none other than Tim Cook, who gave up his spot as Apple CEO last September to John Ternus. As a reminder, Tim Cook succeeded Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple. In the event that he becomes CEO of Nvidia, he would succeed Jensen Huang, co-founder of Nvidia.

Other names, external to Nvidia, are also mentioned: Eric Schmidt (former CEO of Google), Lisa Su (CEO of AMD, Nvidia's main competitor) Lip-Bu Tan (CEO of Intel) or even Bret Taylor (chairman of the board of directors of OpenAI).

Elon Musk already seems ready to hire the now ex-manager of Nvidia. Indeed, an X user asked Elon Musk to hire Jensen Huang, to which he replied: "It would be an honor." It now remains to be seen what Jensen Huang decides, even if he risks keeping a low profile for a little while.

For his part, Tim Sweeney, founder and CEO of Epic Games, must not welcome the resignation of Jensen Huang. On the social network X, he said: “Save Jensen. This would be a level of stupidity on the part of the NVIDIA board comparable to that of Apple when it fired Steve Jobs, and it would seriously harm the interests of the United States.” Jensen Huang was ultimately not saved, the situation having become too tense.

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Machine-translated from French