Who will replace Jensen Huang at Nvidia?

Nvidia is searching for a new permanent CEO to head the company after Jensen Huang resigned as CEO, president, and board member amid reports of two extramarital affairs, one with an executive at the firm and another with a businesswoman who is an alleged Chinese intelligence asset.

“The Board is initiating a search for a permanent Chief Executive Officer and will consider internal and external candidates,” the firm said in a Thursday press release. The odds of Nvidia announcing its next permanent CEO before Dec. 16, 2026 stand at 13%, and 63% by Feb. 1, 2027, data from Kalshi’s event contract shows.

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As to who will be the firm’s next CEO: Ian Buck, Nvidia’s vice president of hyperscale and high-performance computing, is the frontrunner at 42%, an increase from nearly 23% at 8:50 a.m. ET. “Still, he lacks the operational experience that investors often look for at the head of a large publicly traded company,” Bloomberg reported on Nov. 12.

Nvidia CFO Colette Kress, who has agreed to serve as interim CEO, has a 12% probability, down from almost 49% in the same period. “The Board, Estaff and I recognize that this has been an extraordinarily difficult period,” Kress said in a memo sent to company employees after Huang's resignation, according to Business Insider. “Let's move forward together, with the same determination and commitment that have always defined this company.”

Finance chiefs are often tapped to provide short-term stability during a leadership transition, serving as a temporary fix to a permanent successor, Bloomberg added.

Elsewhere, Apple’s chief hardware officer Johny Srouji is the top external candidate, in third with a 9% chance to succeed Huang’s leadership position. Srouji joined Apple in 2008, and now heads the team tasked with creating and building all of the company’s hardware and underlying technologies.

Rene Haas, CEO of chip design business Arm Holdings, takes fourth place at 7%. Haas was vice president and general manager of Nvidia’s computing products business between 2006 and 2013, according to his LinkedIn profile. In 2020, Nvidia attempted to acquire Arm.

Huang co-founded Nvidia more than three decades ago and has turned the company into a $4 trillion chipmaking giant that has fueled the AI-computing frenzy, making him a prominent global figure and a target of China’s top spy agency. The New York Times reported on Oct. 29 that Alice Huang, not related to the ousted Nvidia CEO, had a close relationship with Huang, despite also being an alleged Chinese intelligence asset who funneled information to Beijing.

“The discovery that Beijing was getting reports from someone with direct access to Mr. Huang, one of the most powerful figures in the A.I. revolution as well as an influential ally of President Trump’s, set off alarms at the White House,” The Times said. The findings “raised more troubling possibilities, including that Ms. Huang had insights into Mr. Trump’s thinking on an issue of vital importance to both nations, one likely to come up when the president visits China next month.”

Espionage extends beyond stealing classified documents or proprietary technology, according to The Hill. “A conversation about what President Trump said privately concerning China, an observation about disagreements within his administration or advanced knowledge of Nvidia’s negotiating positions could be enormously valuable to Beijing,” The Hill said.

By Nov. 8, Huang admitted to infidelity. “I owe my family and all of you an apology,” he wrote in an email to Nvidia employees. “I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children.”

On Nov. 10, The Information reported Alice Huang’s years-long relationship with the former CEO helped move at least $7.5 billion of Nvidia chips through Chinese companies, including Shanghai Century Litong, which became an Nvidia preferred cloud partner in 2023 and was initially held via an entity controlled by Alice Huang’s sister. Alice Huang is also a top executive at Megaspeed International, a Singapore-based data center company and Nvidia’s largest Southeast Asian customer that has bought roughly $2 billion of Nvidia products.

The United States government imposed restrictions on Nvidia selling its advanced artificial intelligence chips directly to China. A spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs rejected the reports that Alice Huang was a Chinese spy, calling the claims “nothing but a smear against China.”

Meanwhile, the Justice Department, led by the US attorney’s office in Manhattan, is probing Alice Huang, while Congress is preparing to subpoena Huang, Bloomberg reported on Nov. 11, citing House Foreign Affairs Chairman Brian Mast, House China committee Chairman John Moolenaar, and House Intelligence Chairman Rick Crawford.

Further reports about Huang’s personal conduct have continued to emerge. Citing five people who worked at the company, The Times reported Huang had a second affair with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia vice president of healthcare, who reports to the CEO. Huang and Powell, who are both married to other people, “were captured on video being affectionate at a San Jose, Calif., hotel during a Nvidia conference in March,” The Times said.

Huang’s resignation comes ahead of Nvidia’s third-quarter earnings report scheduled for next week. Kalshi traders are already speculating which words Nvidia representatives will say during the Nov. 17 earnings call, giving “Resign / Resignation / Step Down” a 68% chance of being mentioned and “China” a 61% probability of coming up at least five times.

Kalshi markets now predict:

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