Markets & Business
Nvidia has no clear successor if Jensen Huang is forced out
With Jensen Huang's removal as Nvidia CEO looking increasingly possible and no succession plan in place, analysts and prediction markets are naming candidates from Lisa Su to Eric Schmidt.
Prediction-market bettors on Kalshi give Jensen Huang only a 30% chance of still being Nvidia’s CEO by the end of this week, with the company apparently close to ousting him over a widening personal-conduct controversy. Huang has acknowledged an extramarital affair, though it remains unclear which of two women he meant: Alice Huang, a Chinese executive whom U.S. intelligence agencies suspect of spying on behalf of her country, or Kimberly Powell, an Nvidia executive reporting directly to him, whom five sources told The New York Times was also romantically involved with him. Nvidia has no chairman role and no named successor in place, leaving open who would run one of the world’s most valuable companies.
The Information named AMD CEO Lisa Su — a distant cousin of Huang who runs Nvidia’s most credible rival — this week, though every day Nvidia spends distracted by the controversy already helps her company, giving her little reason to leave her job for his. Yale’s Jeffrey Sonnenfeld instead named former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who led Google between 2001 and 2011, then chaired the National Security Commission on AI between 2018 and 2021, and today heads the rocket company Relativity Space; Sonnenfeld says Schmidt “could parachute in tomorrow and do a very good job,” though Schmidt’s own history of extramarital relationships could make him a hard sell to the board for the same reason Huang is in trouble. A third name, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, is seen as someone who might welcome an exit: Intel’s stock had already slid more than 30% since September before dropping another 20% in after-hours trading last month, after the company’s third-quarter revenue rose 21% to $16.5 billion but its fourth-quarter guidance fell short of Wall Street’s forecasts amid an AI-driven memory-chip shortage that has pushed up PC prices and cut PC sales.
Former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor — a co-creator of Google Maps who was Facebook’s CTO, then chaired Twitter’s board when it was sold to Elon Musk, and later chaired OpenAI’s board during “the Blip,” Sam Altman’s firing and fast return — now runs the AI startup Sierra and is viewed as the calm, experienced hand companies turn to in a crisis. Inside Nvidia, analysts and former employees have floated Ian Buck, the vice president who helped develop CUDA, the chip software underpinning Nvidia’s AI dominance; Kalshi traders give him only a middling shot, though he could look more viable if the board lets Huang stay on in a newly created chairman role and mentor a successor.
Why it matters
Nvidia’s board appears unlikely to cut Huang loose entirely given the wealth he has created for its members, so a new chairman role for Huang paired with an untested successor looks like the most probable outcome — a governance question investors in one of the world’s most valuable companies will be watching closely, with Kalshi’s own odds suggesting an answer within the week.