The Zhitong Finance App learned that people familiar with the matter said that the board of directors of Nvidia (NVDA.US) met on Wednesday local time in the US to discuss whether to replace CEO Huang Renxun, the world's largest AI processor supplier, is being plagued by reports of two extramarital affairs by its head. One of the women involved is allegedly suspected of spying for China. Nvidia did not respond to a request for comment about this meeting.
The report said that the company has hired an external headhunter to find the next CEO. Semafor quoted people familiar with the matter as saying that some directors prefer to appoint Chief Financial Officer Kress as temporary CEO, but the board of directors has yet to make a decision. According to the forecast market Polymarket, there is an 83% chance that Hwang In-hoon will resign or be removed before the end of the year; Buck ranked first and Kress next in the odds for a successor — but the market is very small.
Musk stated on X on the same day, saying “it would be an honor” to hire Hwang In-hoon. Earlier, it was reported that Nvidia is preparing to dismiss Hwang In-hoon. The media revealed his love affair with a direct subordinate, escalating the crisis. The financial consequences of these news are already evident: Nvidia's market capitalization evaporated by around $600 billion this week, making it currently the second-largest company in the world by market capitalization.
Why isn't there a “second place”
Before discussing succession, let's first understand why this is so difficult. Hwang In-hoon never named a successor. He single-handedly founded this company that started with gaming graphics cards, transformed it into an AI computing power machine, and became one of the companies with the highest market capitalization in the world. According to previous analysis by Bernstein and other agencies, about 60 senior executives can directly report to Hwang In-hoon. He himself is closely involved in daily operations — which means that the company has no obvious second-in-command. Analyst Bernstein's statement was later widely quoted: “Hwang In-hoon is Nvidia, and Nvidia is Hwang In-hoon.”
Anna Wu (Anna Wu), founder of Sydney Floodlines Research, said, “Wong In-hoon is a rock star in this industry. He has high-profile and bluntly stated and integrated with the Nvidia brand. It is extremely difficult to replace such a leader.”
Because of this, the market divided the candidates into two sets of lists: one to temporarily stabilize the situation and one to take over the long term.
And Nvidia's family tenure structure — daughter Madison is responsible for the Omniverse software business, son Spencer in the robotics department, and son-in-law participating in emerging cloud customer partnerships — not only deepens the impression that “he is the company,” but also makes it easier for the outside world to speculate about succession to fall on him.
Cress: An obvious choice for stabilizing the situation
The easiest solution is to push the person who attends the performance conference call with Hwang In-hoon on the same stage every quarter: Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress (Colette Kress).
She is 59 years old and joined Nvidia in 2013, having worked for a long time at Microsoft, Cisco, and Texas Instruments, where she was CFO for 13 years. She has always explained the company's revenue growth, gross profit margin, data center business and performance guidelines to Wall Street. Semafor reports that some directors prefer her as temporary CEO.
Josh Gilbert (Josh Gilbert), chief analyst at the trading platform eToro, judged: “Kress is an obvious choice for stabilizing the situation. She has been the head of finance for 13 years, and has been on the same stage as Wong In-hoon in every performance meeting. She is a familiar and credible voice for the market at a time when trust and continuity are desperately needed.”
But he soon separated the two things: “An official appointment is another thing. Nvidia's moat comes from technology, and the board of directors probably wanted an engineer to sit in this chair when selecting the long-term director. ” Cress's resume focuses on the financial field. He is not necessarily a natural successor in technological innovation and product strategy; he is more suited to be understood as a transition candidate to maintain financial and capital market stability.
Buck: the first engineer on the long-term list
The number one on the long-term candidate list is Ian Buck (Ian Buck), who is about 49 years old. He joined Nvidia in 2004. He is one of the main developers of CUDA software systems — CUDA expanded GPUs from graphics processors to general computing platforms, the foundation of later AI training and inference business, and the reason developers were locked into Nvidia chips. He has a doctorate degree from Stanford University (his PhD project laid the foundation for his AI software at Nvidia), and is currently the vice president of hyperscale and high-performance computing, responsible for hardware and software products for large-scale AI customers. His partners include Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, and OpenAI. Business Insider will list potential long-term successors worth watching in a November report.
Shay Boloor (Shay Boloor), chief market strategist at Futurum Equities, said, “If a handover is necessary, Buck is the strongest long-term internal candidate with his experience of participating in creating CUDA and leading hyperscale businesses.”
One footnote to refer to: Just this week, when SpaceX's Starmind space computing project in collaboration with Nvidia went public, it was Buck himself who endorsed this architecture — he told the media that SpaceXAI “is taking this architecture from a huge AI factory to the new frontier of orbital computing.” He is already one of the company's external technical faces.
But what he's really worried about is the next decade. “Hwang In-hoon is not just the CEO of Nvidia; he is the one who has always identified the direction of computing.” Bolur said. This sentence points out the real difficulty of succession arrangements: what the successor must take over is not the right to daily management, but the ability to judge the technical direction.
Other internal and external names
The interior also has two directions. Potential candidates include Jeff Fisher (Jeff Fisher), a 32-year veteran; Hwang In-hoon's two children, Madison and Spencer, are both company executives, but outsiders generally doubt whether they can take over. Armina Rosenberg (Armina Rosenberg), co-founder of Minotaur Capital, which owns Nvidia shares, proposed another idea: first, a senior core team would act as temporary head, or even adopt a co-CEO structure — Kress stabilizes business and finances, and Buck is responsible for products and technology. She emphasized that this was just an investor's idea, not a company plan.
On the external list, the most discussed one is Arm CEO Rene Haas (Rene Haas). He spent 7 years at Nvidia in his early years and is very familiar with the semiconductor industry. A banker involved in chip trading said that Haas has both industry popularity and semiconductor experience, and is “the most logically reasonable.” Other media mentioned AMD CEO Su Zifeng: AMD's revenue has risen sharply during her tenure, but the competitive relationship between the two companies will complicate the transfer, and her kinship with Wong In-hoon is another obstacle. According to Semafor, the head of Apple's hardware, Johnny Srouji (Johny Srouji) — the leader of Apple's self-developed chip systems (A series and M series) — is also being considered.
What's next to look at is more than just names
No matter who the candidate is, the market has more than one question to answer. SLC Management's Dec Mullarkey (Dec Mullarkey) put it bluntly: Finance leaders can explain performance figures, but the market will also ask companies to explain how the governance arrangements will change — how the investigation will end, whether the board structure will be adjusted, and how Wong In-hoon's role will be defined.
The timing is also tight: Nvidia is scheduled to release quarterly results on November 17, which previously indicated revenue of US$108 billion, a year-on-year increase of nearly 90%; on November 18, Wong In-hoon was asked to attend closed-door briefings by three House committees. The results will be mixed with the briefing session with the suspense of a change of coach. This is probably the most special week since the company went public.
And the market couldn't wait that week to start pricing. On November 10, on the same day that the US CPI for October surpassed expectations and boosted interest rate hikes, Nvidia's stock price fell another 5.47%, and the market capitalization once fell below 4 trillion US dollars; of the cumulative market capitalization of about 600 billion US dollars evaporated this week, reports of scandals and changes of command were the main increases after AI trading sentiment.
Conclusions
Looking at the two sets of lists together, the real difference in this succession discussion is no one. The definition of the position: what the temporary CEO needs is market trust, and this candidate has converged to Cress; what the long-term CEO needs is technical judgment, and the candidate has settled down to Buck, but even the analysts who are most optimistic about him admit that he can solve “extremely difficult technical problems,” but he doesn't necessarily have Hwang In-hoon's sense of the direction of the computing industry.
The 83% chance of leaving a job within the year at Polymarket is not so much about pricing Hwang In-hoon's stay as about pricing “whether the board dares to do anything during the financial reporting week.” Before that, every vague statement in the minutes of the board meeting was traded by the market as information.