Who should run Nvidia? Our picks for Jensen Huang’s successor, whether the board likes it or not

Nvidia’s board says it’s too early to speculate about who will succeed Jensen Huang. Sorry, we’re having too much fun coming up with names.

The board said in a statement Friday that it’s still choosing a search firm and hasn’t formally engaged any candidates. That came after the Financial Times reported that the board had approached Arm CEO Rene Haas — a name John had presciently floated when we recorded this week’s GeekWire Podcast on Thursday.

Nvidia announced Huang’s resignation Thursday, a day after the New York Times reported that he’d had an affair with an Nvidia executive who reported to him. Days earlier, he admitted to an affair with a woman U.S. intelligence officials reportedly suspected of being a Chinese spy.

Colette Kress, the company’s longtime CFO, is serving as interim CEO. She spent 13 years at Microsoft earlier in her career.

Others would rather have Huang back.

Two major Nvidia investors, Altimeter Capital’s Brad Gerstner and Atreides Management’s Gavin Baker, asked the board to run a deliberate search that leaves open “the potential return of Jensen Huang.” Elon Musk said on X that he was signing a petition to reinstate Huang.

The organizers of one, called “Stand with Jensen,” say it has more than 108,000 names, including more than 5,600 people who identify themselves as current Nvidia employees.

The case for Haas: The Arm CEO spent about seven years at Nvidia, rising to vice president and general manager of its computing products business, before joining Arm in 2013. He became Arm’s CEO in February 2022, when Nvidia’s $40 billion deal to acquire Arm collapsed amid regulatory opposition. SoftBank, Arm’s majority owner, kept Nvidia’s $1.25 billion prepayment.

Arm, based in Cambridge, England, designs processor technology that’s ubiquitous in smartphones, and licenses it to other chipmakers. That includes Nvidia, whose Grace data center CPU, paired with its GPUs in AI systems, is built on Arm cores. Amazon’s Graviton and Microsoft’s Cobalt server chips also use Arm designs.

Haas is one of several candidates, and there’s no guarantee he’ll be offered the job or take it, the FT reported.

He also has a link to Harvey Jones, the longtime Nvidia director named the company’s first board chair this week. Haas was vice president of sales at Tensilica, a chip-design company, from 1999 to 2004, according to his LinkedIn profile. Jones co-founded Tensilica and chaired its board until chip-design software maker Cadence acquired it in 2013.

Haas has also seen Huang’s resistance to succession planning firsthand. “He didn’t like the idea,” Haas said in a 2024 interview, as quoted by the New York Times this week. “He felt it would create competition among executives and be divisive.”

One complication: SoftBank named Haas CEO of SoftBank Group International in April, helping coordinate chip and AI companies in its international portfolio while he continues to run Arm. The FT reported that the appointment was aimed at pushing forward Project Izanagi, SoftBank’s AI chip effort launched to compete with Nvidia.

He knows Nvidia from the inside, but he also knows what it’s like to run a public company — which matters for a board searching in the middle of a crisis.

John’s argument on the podcast: Nvidia needs someone who can shepherd a company through turmoil, not just a great technologist. Think Alan Mulally going from Boeing to Ford, or Dara Khosrowshahi moving from Expedia to Uber after Travis Kalanick’s ouster.

What the betting markets say: On Kalshi, Ian Buck, the Nvidia vice president who created the CUDA software platform, was the favorite at midday Friday. By midday Saturday, Haas had overtaken him, at 25% to Buck’s 18%. Kress was at 10%.

The Axios list of 11 names also includes Apple Executive Chair Tim Cook, for whom President Trump lobbied on Truth Social (“A Legend replaces a Legend!”), along with AMD CEO Lisa Su and Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian.

A Northwest wildcard: Analysts have also floated Sanjay Mehrotra, CEO of Boise, Idaho-based Micron Technology, whose memory chips power Nvidia’s AI servers. Mehrotra co-founded SanDisk in 1988 and has run Micron since 2017.

The AWS chief: Matt Garman has run Amazon Web Services since June 2024, overseeing a business with a $142 billion annual revenue run rate at the end of last year. He started at Amazon as an MBA intern in 2005, joined AWS full time in 2006 as one of its first product managers, and later led its compute business and then its sales and marketing organization.

Another Amazon pick: We’d also look at Peter DeSantis, who now leads a new organization that includes Amazon’s AI models, custom chips and quantum computing, reporting directly to CEO Andy Jassy.

DeSantis joined Amazon as a software developer in 1998. He led the EC2 team from Cape Town, South Africa, through its 2006 launch, and spearheaded Amazon’s 2015 acquisition of Annapurna Labs, the Israeli chip designer behind its custom silicon.

In 2018, DeSantis unveiled Graviton. In June, he told Bloomberg that AWS was in talks to sell its Trainium AI chips to other companies for their own data centers.

He knows chips, data centers and AI infrastructure at enormous scale. The catch, as John noted: he’s never been a CEO, and the board may want that experience given the circumstances.

The other Amazon name: Dave Treadwell took over AWS compute and machine learning services in August. Treadwell spent 27 years at Microsoft, where he worked on Windows NT, .NET and Xbox and rose to corporate vice president, before joining Amazon in 2016.

The Microsoft bench: On the podcast, Todd ran through a few Microsoft executives who would bring relevant experience:

• Amy Hood, Microsoft’s CFO since 2013, who has managed the company’s massive AI infrastructure spending.
• Scott Guthrie, who runs Microsoft’s cloud and AI group. Microsoft is a major Nvidia customer.
• Judson Althoff, whom CEO Satya Nadella named CEO of Microsoft’s commercial business last year, overseeing sales, marketing and operations.

The insider with Microsoft roots: Nick Parker, a 26-year Microsoft sales veteran, joined Nvidia in August as executive vice president of worldwide field operations, with a pay package worth more than $40 million. He’s new, but he already runs the team that sells Nvidia’s chips to the world’s largest companies.

One more angle: Whoever gets the job will face a growing list of customers trying to reduce their reliance on Nvidia, including Amazon. In his annual shareholder letter in April, Jassy wrote that Amazon’s chips business would have an annual run rate of about $50 billion if it sold chips to AWS and other third parties the way other chipmakers do.

Jassy said it’s “quite possible” Amazon will sell racks of them to third parties in the future.

In a Bloomberg interview recorded Oct. 14, Huang said he hoped his successor was already inside the company. The board has said it will consider both internal and external candidates.

Listen to our full discussion on this week’s GeekWire Podcast.