Nvidia’s next CEO: The outside contenders to succeed Jensen Huang

ملخص مفصل

Rene Haas, Lisa Su and Tim Cook are among the names floated as Nvidia faces a defining choice between technical leadership and seasoned management.

The biggest guessing game in business has begun: Who can fill Jensen Huang’s shoes?

Colette Kress, chief financial officer at Nvidia since 2013, was appointed interim CEO of the company on Thursday. Kress will also continue in her CFO role as the board conducts its search for Jensen Huang’s permanent successor.

“Colette is very much the right interim CEO,” Scott W. Simmons, co-managing partner of executive search firm Crist Kolder Associates, told Fortune. But Simmons, who has worked in executive recruiting for almost 30 years, thinks Nvidia’s board will seek a technologist as Huang’s permanent successor, potentially from outside the company.

If Nvidia goes with an external candidate for the CEO job, Shay Boloor, chief market strategist at The Futurum Group, is putting his money on 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 in an X post. “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 would bring a combination of Nvidia experience and public-company leadership, having steered Arm through its 2023 IPO and expanded its business beyond processor licensing. His background spans engineering, product strategy and sales. But his familiarity with Nvidia dates to an earlier era: he left in 2013. The board will have to assess whether running Arm has prepared him for Nvidia’s much larger, more complex business.

Sugarman also pointed to AMD CEO Lisa Su as a potential successor to Huang. Su (who ironically happens to be a distant cousin of Huang’s) would bring a combination of semiconductor engineering credentials and a proven…

Me…

مطلع المقال، مقتطف من Fortune. لقراءة المقال كاملًا، افتحه على موقع الناشر.