Nvidia’s next CEO: The outside contenders to succeed Jensen Huang

Colette Kress, chief financial officer at Nvidia since 2013, was appointed interim CEO of the company on Thursday. Kress will also continue in her CFO role as the board conducts its search for Jensen Huang’s permanent successor. 

“Colette is very much the right interim CEO,” Scott W. Simmons, co-managing partner of executive search firm Crist Kolder Associates, told Fortune. But Simmons, who has worked in executive recruiting for almost 30 years, thinks Nvidia’s board will seek a technologist as Huang’s permanent successor, potentially from outside the company.

If Nvidia goes with an external candidate for the CEO job, Shay Boloor, chief market strategist at The Futurum Group, is putting his money on Arm CEO Rene Haas.

“He spent seven years at Nvidia and understands Jensen’s culture; and what makes him interesting is that Nvidia’s Grace and Vera CPUs run on Arm architecture,” Boloor wrote in an X post. “So while he missed [the] rise of NVLink, Mellanox and rack-scale AI he understands [the] CPU side of Nvidia’s platform better than almost anyone else on the outside.”

Sam Sugarman, a venture capital and private equity investor who co-founded and leads the VC/PE Secondaries practice at Concordia Capital, also placed Haas on his list of external candidates.

Haas would bring a combination of Nvidia experience and public-company leadership, having steered Arm through its 2023 IPO and expanded its business beyond processor licensing. His background spans engineering, product strategy and sales. But his familiarity with Nvidia dates to an earlier era: he left in 2013. The board will have to assess whether running Arm has prepared him for Nvidia’s much larger, more complex business.

Sugarman also pointed to AMD CEO Lisa Su as a potential successor to Huang. Su (who ironically happens to be a distant cousin of Huang’s) would bring a combination of semiconductor engineering credentials and a proven record of running a major chipmaker. She has led AMD since 2014, overseeing a turnaround that made it a formidable competitor in processors and a challenger to Nvidia in AI chips. That experience could appeal to a board. But recruiting her would mean persuading a sitting CEO to leave the company she rebuilt.

Meanwhile, Dan Ives, partner and senior managing director at Yorkville Ives & Co., told Fortune that he sees Tim Cook, the former CEO of Apple; Tom Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud; and Nikesh Arora, chairman and CEO of Palo Alto Networks, “as the top three external candidates for Nvidia’s CEO role.”

Cook would bring experience with a challenge few executives have faced: succeeding a technology company’s defining leader. Cook took over from Steve Jobs and spent 15 years running Apple before becoming executive chairman in September. Cook’s mastery of supply chains and logistics would be a good fit at Nvidia, and the fact that Apple has developed its own processors in-house over the past decade means Cook has some direct experience in the chips business. His continuing work on Apple’s international relationships would also be relevant to a company navigating geopolitical pressures.

But his continuing responsibilities at Apple as chairman could complicate the prospect of recruiting him. That said, Cook has the support of one high-profile observer: President Trump posted on Truth Social Thursday that Cook should replace Huang.  

Kurian would offer a connection to Nvidia’s AI infrastructure business. Before taking over Google Cloud in 2019, Kurian spent 22 years at Oracle, ultimately becoming president of product development. At Google Cloud, he has also worked closely with Nvidia through the companies’ AI infrastructure partnership. The question is how readily that experience would translate to leading the chipmaker itself.

Arora would bring the experience of a sitting public-company chief executive with a career spanning enterprise technology, global sales and investment. Before joining the cybersecurity company in 2018, Arora was president and COO of SoftBank and held senior commercial roles at Google, including chief business officer. His appeal as a candidate could depend on whether Nvidia wants a strategist who can build around its technical leaders.

There may be pros and cons for each potential candidate, but the board’s choice will ultimately determine Nvidia’s fate. “There’s such a small pool to fish in when you think about people capable of stepping into this,” Simmons said.