The CEO and founder of Nvidia resigned on Thursday morning, following the bombshell revelation that he had an affair with an alleged Chinese spy. With Jensen Huang officially out of the company, the short list of possible successors is going around with some very powerful names on the ticket.
Jensen Huang had what was considered one of the most legendary resumes on the internet. His LinkedIn page listed only two employers. He started out as a dishwasher, busboy, and waiter at Denny’s in 1978. Five years later, he took a decade-long hiatus and then came back in 1993 as the co-founder and CEO of Nvidia.
It’s too early to tell how this chain of events will affect Nvida’s business trajectory and the stability of the AI industry.
After 31 years running his company, bolstered by meteoric growth that made it a household name in the gaming industry and AI, his reign was ultimately cut short, thanks to an extramarital relationship he had with an alleged Chinese spy named Alice Huang (no relation). Today, Huang officially resigned as the CEO and a board member of Nvidia.
As Huang exits the company, Nvidia appointed a new interim CEO to fill his shoes. Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress will serve in his stead, while Harvey C. Jones will become the company’s first appointed chair of the board.
The night before Huang’s resignation, whispers of possible successors had already made the rounds on the internet, teeming with top talent, familiar faces, and some unexpected surprises.
Polymarket suggested that Madison Huang, Jensen’s daughter, was a top contender among traders. However, as of this morning, she sits in third place on the prediction market at only a 3% possibility of securing the spot.
Instead, traders highly favor Ian Buck as the next Nvidia CEO. Buck is the current VP general manager of Hyperscale and HPC at Nvidia. Having invented Compute Unified Device Architecture, which is a software translation platform that enables Nvidia GPUs to train and run advanced AI models, he’s responsible for working with partners to outfit AI data centers with Nvidia’s GPUs. He’s been with the company since 2004 and holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University.
Far behind Buck in second place, traders think the current interim CEO, Colette Kress, would be a good fit. She’s the executive vice president and chief financial officer of Nvidia with 25 years of experience working with tech giants, including Microsoft, Cisco, and, of course, Nvidia. She holds a bachelor of science degree in finance from the University of Arizona, and she also has an MBA from Southern Methodist University.
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Outside the prediction markets, the internet floated several other names that would make for interesting replacements. These include powerful people like former Apple CEO Tim Cook, current Apple chief hardware officer and the man behind Apple Silicon chips Johny Srouji, AMD CEO Lisa Su, and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan.
Blaze News reached out to Nvidia for further comment on the timeline to pick a new permanent CEO, possible investigations from the U.S. government over Alice Huang’s ties to China, and whether there will be any changes to Nvidia’s gaming or AI strategies under its new leadership. We did not receive a response by the deadline, but the company included this message in this morning’s press release:
It’s too early to tell how this chain of events will affect Nvidia’s business trajectory and the stability of the AI industry, which is already teetering on the edge of collapse. However, after a steep drop in Nvidia’s stock price following the news of Huang’s affair, the company’s valuation is climbing now that an interim CEO has taken over.
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[H/T Blaze Media]
