Who could run Nvidia if Jensen Huang is ousted?

Jensen Huang is such a towering figure at Nvidia that his extramarital affairs – with a suspected Chinese spy and reportedly with a colleague – have left the world’s most valuable chipmaker with what could be the world’s biggest corporate succession problem.

Trading on a rags-to-riches life story that saw him make huge, risky long-term bets on the future of the technology market, Huang developed a reputation as a tech visionary whose name was synonymous with – and even eclipsed – that of his company.

Now, in effect for the first time since he cofounded the business in 1993, a true discussion has begun on who might replace him.

“We always knew key man risk was an issue for Nvidia,” said Stacy Rasgon at Bernstein. “It’s not intuitively obvious who the successor would be ... there’s blood in the water now.”

Nvidia employees, known for their fierce loyalty to the chief executive and comparatively low attrition rates, have been left stunned. Some are angry, unsure whether Huang can stay on.

“It’s the biggest fall from grace,” said one long-time Nvidia colleague, adding that a “globally respected and admired” tech group had been brought low “by his own ego and weakness”.

Huang uses an unusual horizontal management structure with about 60 executives reporting directly to him. This gives him enormous reach and influence over every decision made within the company.

The arrangement means that in Huang’s absence, no single executive is positioned to assume his role of chief diplomat, strategist, lobbyist, investor and salesperson. Nor does Nvidia have a formal public succession plan – an idea Huang has said he does not believe in.

Colleagues say Huang is known for dropping into an email thread with relatively junior staff to ask about the minutiae of products. His influence is reflected even in the physical layout of its headquarters.

The chief executive holds court over a large group of executives at the start of each week in a special conference room that doubles as Huang’s office, emphasising the “flat” organisational structure he has developed.

Executives sit around a huge oval desk, with a few rows of stadium-like seating at the back and boards for brainstorming on the walls. “Jensen speaks for most of it,” said one person who has attended these meetings.

That same horizontal system built around a single unique personality is set to fragment if Huang is ousted.

Nvidia’s board, which includes multiple Huang allies who have worked with him since the 1990s, has launched an independent investigation led by a former US federal prosecutor.

One person inside the company said the easiest solution in the event of Huang resigning or being forced out would be for the board to appoint finance chief, Colette Kress, as interim chief executive while it considers a permanent replacement.

The person described Kress – who is well known to the investor and analyst community but has been content to allow her boss to take the limelight – as having the ruthlessness, “sharp elbows” and broad understanding of Nvidia’s sprawling finances needed for the role.

The company has a pipeline of deals and products that stretches into the next decade, meaning there is unlikely to be an immediate impact on its day-to-day operations or strategic roadmap.

Kress, who joined in 2013 from Cisco and who previously worked at Microsoft, is not an engineer like her boss, however, and lacks his technical knowledge. Her first big public test will come on Tuesday when she is due to host the company’s quarterly results call.

Kress is one of an inner circle of four formal executive officers around Huang. The other three are general counsel Tim Teter, operations chief Debora Shoquist and worldwide field operations chief Nick Parker.

Parker joined Nvidia from Microsoft only in August, replacing long-time Huang confidant Jay Puri, who retired. Puri had been overseeing Parker’s transition into that role as “senior adviser”.

Teter, a former lawyer at Palo Alto-based firm Cooley, has played a key role in Nvidia’s lobbying operations over AI chip exports in Washington, which now face a major bipartisan backlash after the midterm elections.

Chris Malachowsky, the engineer who cofounded the company with Huang, still officially works for it as an “Nvidia fellow” but is not involved in day-to-day operations.

Two company sources also pointed to two-decade Nvidia veteran Ian Buck, who heads Nvidia’s critical data centre business and is known for building the Cuda software that its AI chips use.

Unlike Kress, Buck is not officially part of Nvidia’s innermost circle of executives. However, the subdued, approachable engineer is held in high regard within the company and can compete with his boss’s technical understanding of the company’s vast product portfolio, the people said.

If the board looks outside the company, analysts say an obvious candidate would be Arm chief executive Rene Haas – himself a former Nvidia executive.

Meanwhile, Lisa Su at AMD, Nvidia’s closest competitor, already has experience rescuing a major company from crisis. Spokespeople for both executives did not respond to requests for comment.

Huang’s daughter, Madison Huang, who joined Nvidia as an intern about six years ago, is now in a senior product marketing role. She had been seen as a potential successor before the scandal erupted, albeit far in the future, two sources said.

She had started appearing more frequently, accompanying her father on international trips, including his most recent visit to Europe last month.

Jensen Huang told Bloomberg last month that either Madison Huang or his son Spencer Huang, who also works at Nvidia, would “have to earn it” and suggested he planned to stay in the role for as long as 20 more years.

“We should create the conditions by which the company continues to thrive,” Huang said. “Just as I can be fired, the next CEO has to be hired.”

Nvidia did not immediately respond to a request for comment. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026