9 executives who could lead Nvidia if Jensen Huang were to join Elon Musk

Dubai: Elon Musk said it would be an honour to hire Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang after an X user urged him to do so. “That would be an honor,” Musk replied on Wednesday, without naming a role or saying whether he had spoken to Huang.

The exchange came as Nvidia’s directors were due to meet to consider whether to remove Huang, Reuters reported, citing a person familiar with the matter.

Bloomberg separately reported that the board had enlisted an outside firm to identify potential successors and was weighing an interim appointment while it looked for a permanent chief. Nvidia has yet to announce a leadership change or name a successor.

Huang, who co-founded Nvidia in 1993, acknowledged in a November 8 email to staff that he had been unfaithful to his wife. Nvidia’s board said it had opened an independent investigation into reports that he was the target of a foreign intelligence effort and said it had no reason to believe US national security or company secrets had been compromised. The New York Times subsequently reported an alleged second affair involving an Nvidia executive who reported to Huang.

If Huang leaves, the board could turn to a familiar executive to run Nvidia while it decides who should lead the company long term. Kress and Buck stood out among the analysts and investors Reuters spoke to, while Bloomberg’s rundown also pointed to executives from the chip and cloud computing industries.

1. Colette Kress, Nvidia’s chief financial officer

Kress has been Nvidia’s finance chief since 2013 and regularly joins Huang on quarterly earnings calls. That gives investors a familiar voice if the board needs an interim CEO. Some directors favour Kress for that role, Semafor reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

2. Ian Buck, Nvidia vice president

Buck joined Nvidia in 2004 and helped develop CUDA, the software that lets developers use Nvidia’s graphics chips for tasks such as training and running AI models. He now oversees AI hardware and software for large data centre customers. Shay Boloor, chief market strategist at Futurum Equities, told Reuters that Buck was Nvidia’s strongest long-term internal option if a transition became necessary.

3. Rene Haas, Arm chief executive

Haas worked at Nvidia before joining Arm, the chip design company he has led since 2022. He has experience running a listed technology company whose customers include major chipmakers. Boloor also singled him out to Reuters as an external candidate worth considering.

4. Lisa Su, AMD chair and chief executive

Su has led Advanced Micro Devices since 2014. AMD sells processors for servers and AI accelerators that compete with Nvidia’s, giving Su experience selling chips to many of the same data centre customers.

5. Johny Srouji, Apple’s chief hardware officer

Srouji joined Apple in 2008 to lead development of processors for the iPhone. That work laid the foundation for the custom chips Apple now uses across its products. His current role covers both chip development and the hardware engineering that goes into the devices those chips power.

6. Matt Garman, Amazon Web Services chief executive

Garman has led Amazon’s cloud computing division since June 2024. AWS gives companies access to computing power through its data centres, making Garman familiar with how cloud providers buy and deploy the kind of chips Nvidia sells. Business Insider reported that industry observers had floated his name as a potential successor.

7. Sanjay Mehrotra, Micron chair and chief executive

Mehrotra has led Micron since 2017. His experience is in memory chips, including the high-bandwidth memory used alongside AI processors to move large volumes of data quickly. That gives him a view of a part of the AI supply chain that Nvidia depends on.

8. Amin Vahdat, Google’s chief technologist

Vahdat’s team works across Google’s custom chips, data centres and networks. He has helped develop Google’s tensor processing units, or TPUs, which the company uses to train and run AI models and offers to customers through Google Cloud.

9. Nico Caprez, Nvidia vice president for AI

Caprez, Huang’s son-in-law, works with specialist cloud providers and on data centre deployments, according to Bloomberg’s rundown. His role puts him close to the companies building AI infrastructure with Nvidia’s chips.

 - With inputs from Agencies