Colette Kress Has Been Named Interim Chief of Nvidia. But There’s Another Executive Favored to Replace Jensen Huang

Although Jensen Huang has officially resigned as CEO of Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA), a new story is quickly emerging: who will replace the man many call the Godfather of artificial intelligence.

AI is a generational, game-changing new technology, and Huang founded Nvidia over three decades ago, so whoever replaces Huang has enormous shoes to fill.

Nvidia's CFO Colette Kress has been named interim CEO. It's a logical choice. Kress has been CFO of Nvidia for 13 years, is always on conference calls, and knows Nvidia's numbers likely better than anyone.

However, another executive is favored to replace Huang in the top job as of this writing.

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The inventor of CUDA

As of 5:53 p.m. ET on Nov. 12, Kalshi assigned a 42% chance that a Nvidia executive named Ian Buck would become Nvidia’s next CEO. Kress has the next-highest chance at 13%, and there are others in the running as well.

Buck, according to his LinkedIn profile, has been a vice president and general manager of Nvidia for nearly 14 years and has worked at Nvidia for over 22 years. Buck completed his undergraduate studies at Princeton University and then earned a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford.

According to various biographies, Buck was the development lead for Brook, the programming language that enabled developers to leverage the parallel processing capabilities of graphics processing units (GPUs) for general-purpose computing. Buck is also credited with creating CUDA, which stands for Compute Unified Device Architecture.

CUDA came out in 2006 and has served as a key moat for Nvidia and its GPUs. CUDA is a parallel computing platform and programming model that helps developers build applications with Nvidia's GPUs. CUDA has become the industry standard for deploying new AI applications, providing Nvidia with a strong moat.

Investors can think of CUDA as an operating system that runs only on Nvidia chips. So even though there are competitors that can build chips just as powerful as Nvidia, developers will be less prone to switch because they would have to use a different computing platform that they may not know as well.

Why an innovator like Buck could make sense

The Huang scandal and quick departure stunned much of Wall Street, which is why the stock has tanked over the past week. Many analysts and pundits also speculated that there was no succession plan in place prior to the scandal.

Buck could make sense for several reasons. Even though Huang is tough to replace, Nvidia still has a great product in high demand. One question, though, is what does innovation look like after Huang.

After all, Nvidia frequently releases new chip models. Buck provides investors with reassurance that the product is unlikely to go stale. His hiring would resemble Apple's recent decision to name the longtime Apple executive and former senior vice president of hardware engineering, John Ternus, as its new CEO to replace Tim Cook.

"He (Buck) could protect Nvidia's technological edge, but his ability to manage the wider commercial relationships and geopolitical challenges would face scrutiny," Charu Chanana, an investment strategist at the investment bank Saxo, said in a research note, according to the BBC.

With Huang gone, there are still many concerns about Nvidia, particularly regarding the company's relationship with China and its sales to foreign companies that may have illegally re-exported the chips to China.

Chanana raises an interesting point, as one of Huang's big tasks over the past year-and-a-half has been convincing the Trump administration to allow Nvidia to sell chips in China. Buck may not have experience in this realm, which will likely face even more scrutiny moving forward.

While Kalshi offers some insight, the prediction markets platform has certainly been wrong many times before, and we don't know how long it will take Nvidia to name a new CEO -- it could be tomorrow or months from now.

There are also other candidates who have a chance of becoming Nvidia's CEO, according to Kalshi, including former Nvidia executive Rene Haas, who is now the CEO of Arm Holdings, and Apple's Chief Hardware Officer Johny Srouji.

But right now, Buck is the clear favorite.

Bram Berkowitz has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Apple, Arm Holdings, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.