Nvidia: here are the names of Jensen Huang’s potential successors

Turning to the company’s internal candidates, one of the potential successors is the current vice-president Ian Buck, who is responsible for managing Nvidia’s data centre products, such as artificial intelligence chips. As well as being known to all the company’s major clients, he has the advantage of being the principal inventor of CUDA, the software framework that helps make the chips suitable for artificial intelligence. The downside, however, mirrors that of Kress: Buck completely lacks the operational and financial experience that investors often look for in the leader of a large publicly listed company.

Let’s now take a look at the names of the managers joining us from other clubs.

Many consider the CEO of Arm, Rene Haas, to be a likely candidate. His strongest assets are the fact that he has already worked at Nvidia for seven years and that the company of which he is CEO already designs processors and enjoys a close working relationship with the firm seeking a permanent CEO. Nvidia had even attempted to acquire Arm, a deal that fell through due to antitrust concerns.

The name of Lisa Su, CEO of Advanced Micro Devices, which heads the world’s largest microprocessor manufacturer and, in a sense, is also a direct competitor to Nvidia itself in terms of the technology it offers and the customer base it serves. Under her leadership, AMD has overtaken Intel, a pioneer in chip manufacturing, in terms of technological leadership, and AMD’s share price has risen nearly 170-fold. However, AMD is only a fraction of the size of the Californian giant, and its artificial intelligence chips still have a long way to go before they achieve the same level of adoption as Nvidia’s.

Whilst on the subject of technology experts, we should also mention Johny Srouji, Chief Hardware Officer at Apple, who has led one of the industry’s most successful semiconductor manufacturing programmes, overseeing the custom chips that power iPhones, Macs and other Apple devices. His experience lends him considerable credibility in chip design, product integration and long-term technology roadmaps. Much of his experience, however, has been gained within Apple’s tightly controlled ecosystem, and Srouji has never personally been involved in marketing – an area in which the recently departed Huang was very active.

He has a more well-rounded profile Matt Garman, head of web services at Amazon: like Huang, he combines technical and operational expertise. He leads a wide-ranging operation that rents out computing power from an extensive network of data centres, including Amazon’s proprietary chips. However, one point against him is that the Seattle-based giant was initially seen as lagging behind competitors such as Microsoft or Google in building infrastructure for artificial intelligence, a field that is absolutely essential for the Santa Clara-based company.

Specialising in the management of technology companies experiencing periods of boom and crisis is Sanjay Mehrotra, the current CEO of the US-based Micron Technology. Under his leadership, the company has seen its share price rise by over 2,700 per cent, driven by the surge in RAM prices resulting from increased demand for artificial intelligence, as well as the upheavals caused by Donald Trump’s erratic decisions on tariffs. On the other hand, however, his experience lies primarily in the design and manufacture of memory modules, whilst he has done little work on graphics processing units and software ecosystems.

In contrast, Amin Vahdat is vice-president and general manager of the AI and infrastructure division at Google, and oversees the company’s Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) programme, another challenger to Nvidia’s dominance in the artificial intelligence chip sector. His technical credentials are impressive, but like several candidates on the list with a strong engineering background, he has little experience in managing a large, publicly listed company with the scale, commercial complexity and colossal market capitalisation of Nvidia.