Nvidia's CEO Search: The Outside Contenders to Succeed Jensen Huang

Colette Kress, Nvidia's CFO since 2013, became interim CEO on Thursday while the board searches for a permanent successor to Jensen Huang. She keeps the finance role throughout the process, anchoring the company through what may be the most closely watched succession in corporate America.

The biggest guessing game in business has begun: who can fill Huang's shoes? Board chair Harvey Jones is expected to lead the search, and executive recruiters see a clear pattern in what comes next.

"Colette is very much the right interim CEO," Scott W. Simmons, co-managing partner of executive search firm Crist Kolder Associates, told Fortune. Simmons, who has spent almost 30 years in executive recruiting, expects the board to seek a technologist as Huang's permanent successor — potentially from outside the company.

Who leads the external field?

Shay Boloor, chief market strategist at The Futurum Group, backs 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 on X. "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 brings a rare combination: Nvidia experience plus public-company leadership. He steered Arm through its 2023 IPO and expanded the business beyond processor licensing, with a background spanning engineering, product strategy and sales. But his Nvidia tenure belongs to an earlier era — he left in 2013. The board must judge whether running Arm has prepared him for a much larger, more complex business.

What about Lisa Su?

Sugarman also named AMD CEO Lisa Su, who happens to be a distant cousin of Huang's. Su offers semiconductor engineering credentials and a proven record running a major chipmaker. She has led AMD since 2014, overseeing a turnaround that made the company a formidable competitor in processors and a challenger to Nvidia in AI chips.

That record could appeal to a board seeking proven operators. The obstacle is practical: recruiting Su would mean persuading a sitting CEO to leave the company she rebuilt.

Which sitting executives are in the frame?

Dan Ives, partner and senior managing director at Yorkville Ives & Co., sees three names at the top: former Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google Cloud CEO Tom Kurian, and Palo Alto Networks chairman and CEO Nikesh Arora — what he called "the top three external candidates for Nvidia's CEO role."

Each brings a distinct case:

• Tim Cook has faced the challenge few executives ever meet: succeeding a technology company's defining leader. He took over from Steve Jobs and ran Apple for 15 years before becoming executive chairman in September. His supply-chain mastery fits Nvidia well, and Apple's decade of in-house processor development gives him direct chips experience. His international relationships would matter to a company under geopolitical pressure. One complication: his continuing chairman duties at Apple. He also has a high-profile backer — President Trump posted on Truth Social Thursday that Cook should replace Huang.
• Tom Kurian offers a direct connection to Nvidia's AI infrastructure business. He spent 22 years at Oracle, rising to president of product development, before taking over Google Cloud in 2019. There he has worked closely with Nvidia through the companies' AI infrastructure partnership. The question is how readily that translates to leading the chipmaker itself.
• Nikesh Arora brings a sitting public-company CEO's experience across enterprise technology, global sales and investment. Before joining the cybersecurity company in 2018, he served as president and COO of SoftBank and held senior commercial roles at Google, including chief business officer. His appeal may hinge on whether Nvidia wants a strategist who can build around its technical leaders.

Why the choice matters so much

Every candidate carries trade-offs. The board's decision will ultimately determine Nvidia's fate in a market it has come to define.

"There's such a small pool to fish in when you think about people capable of stepping into this," Simmons said.

For now, Kress runs the company while the search proceeds. The takeaway in plain words: Nvidia has a steady interim hand, but the permanent pick — likely an outside technologist — will shape the company's next decade.