Nvidia's Board May Oust Jensen Huang — and Ian Buck Tops the Successor List

Nvidia has lost roughly $673 billion in market value in a week, and its board is preparing to oust CEO Jensen Huang, The Wall Street Journal reported at 5:27 PM ET. The stock sat at $158.76 in after-hours trading at 7:55 PM ET, down 8.6% from Wednesday's close and 14.9% since the November 6 close — the last trading day before Huang admitted an affair. Nvidia has not commented, and it has never named a successor to the only CEO the company has ever had.

The reported board meeting could happen as soon as Wednesday night, according to the Journal. The trigger was a New York Times report that Huang had a relationship with Nvidia executive Kimberly Powell. That leaves one question ahead of all others: who runs a $3.83 trillion company that has never had any chief executive besides its founder? The answer, among people who know Nvidia's inner workings, keeps landing on the same name: Ian Buck.

Who is Ian Buck?

Buck runs Nvidia's hyperscale and high-performance computing business — the division that sells to the giant cloud and AI customers whose data center spending made Nvidia the most valuable chipmaker in the world. He has been at Nvidia for about two decades. Before that, as a Stanford Ph.D. student, he built Brook, one of the first programming languages for running general computing work on graphics chips.

At Nvidia, Buck became a key architect of CUDA, the software platform that lets developers write programs for Nvidia's chips. CUDA is the reason Nvidia's customers find it hard to leave. Millions of developers write for it, and code written for CUDA does not run on rival chips without rework. Analysts call it Nvidia's moat. Buck helped dig it.

That history matters here. Huang's value to Nvidia rests on two things: he understands the chips and software better than almost anyone, and the biggest buyers of AI computing trust him. Buck is one of the few Nvidia executives who checks both boxes — with the caveat that running a division, however large, is not the same as running the whole company.

Why is Buck's name coming up now?

Nvidia has no succession plan, and analysts say that gap is now a liability. "Mr. Huang being removed immediately could be challenging for Nvidia since it does not have a succession plan in place," Gil Luria of D.A. Davidson told Reuters on Wednesday.

Commentators moved quickly to fill the vacuum. "It's probably going to be Ian Buck," robotics engineer Dennis Hong wrote on X on Wednesday afternoon. "Been there for two decades and a key architect of CUDA. Arguably the most interesting and probable candidate because he understands the technology moat, and not just the financial model."

The authors behind Yale's CEO leadership forums went further in an essay for Time published Wednesday evening. They called Buck "an admired tech superstar" with "strong relationships with NVIDIA's largest customers." They wrote that he "would be a hugely strong replacement who brings the right technical expertise, customer relationships, experience, and employee relationships for the role," and that he "has garnered influential endorsements as the next CEO from several key commentators, including Jim Cramer."

International Business Times reported Monday that Buck has surfaced in outside successor discussions because of his technical background and his experience running Nvidia's accelerated computing business. Endorsements, however, are not board decisions — Nvidia has not designated any executive as Huang's replacement.

Who else is on the list?

Buck is not the only candidate in the conversation.

• Colette Kress, Nvidia's chief financial officer since 2013, is the executive investors know best. The Time essay suggested she and Buck could even share the job as interim co-CEOs. Analysts quoted by Axios said her career in finance makes her a less natural fit for the technical side of Huang's role.
• Lisa Su, AMD's CEO, and Rene Haas, Arm's CEO, are outside names The Information floated, according to Benzinga. Either would mean hiring the chief of a rival or a key supplier.
• Tim Cook and Eric Schmidt were named in the Time essay as outside leaders who have succeeded or steadied famous founders.

Baird analysts wrote Wednesday that a CEO change was growing more likely and that they would favor an outside hire. That position cuts against the insider consensus around Buck, and the board has not said what it will do.

What does this mean for shareholders?

Dan Ives of Yorkville Ives has estimated that Nvidia would be worth 25% to 30% less without Huang. At the after-hours price, that translates to roughly $958 billion to $1,150 billion of market value. A successor the market already trusts on the technology and with the customers is the most direct way to shrink that number. That is why a name like Buck's matters as much as the board's decision on Huang himself.

History cuts both ways on speed. When McDonald's fired CEO Steve Easterbrook in 2019, it named his successor in the same announcement, and the stock was up 14.7% a year later. When Intel's Brian Krzanich resigned in 2018 with no successor ready, Intel ran on an interim CEO for seven months and trailed the S&P 500 by 17 points over the next year.

Both precedents involve companies far less valuable than Nvidia is today, and neither faced an AI spending cycle of this scale. For Nvidia holders, how quickly the board names a credible leader may matter more than who that leader is — and the market's verdict on that name will arrive within minutes of the announcement.