Market betting platform Kalshi has placed the probability of Jensen Huang remaining in his role this week at roughly thirty percent. The CEO’s personal life has entered the public arena, with reports that he disclosed an affair but did not specify whether the other party was Alice Huang, a Chinese executive under U.S. intelligence scrutiny, or Kimberly Powell, an Nvidia executive who, according to a New York Times investigation, was also involved romantically.
Lisa Su, who leads AMD, is frequently cited as a credible external option. Her company competes directly with Nvidia and would stand to gain if the latter were distracted by investigations and congressional hearings. Nonetheless, analysts note that Su has no apparent incentive to abandon a secure position that already places her at the helm of Nvidia’s most formidable rival.
Eric Schmidt emerged as a possible parachute candidate after Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, senior associate dean for leadership studies at the Yale School of Management, remarked that Schmidt could "parachute in tomorrow and do a very good job." Schmidt’s résumé includes a decade as Google chief executive, chairmanship of the National Security Commission on AI, and current leadership of the aerospace firm Relativity Space, though his own history of extramarital relationships could pose a reputational hurdle.
Intel chief Lip-Bu Tan is another name floated by market watchers. Intel reported third-quarter revenue of $16.5 billion, up twenty-one percent year over year, before warning that fourth-quarter results would miss Wall Street expectations. The warning triggered a twenty-percent drop in after-hours trading and contributed to a broader decline of more than thirty percent since September. The AI-driven memory-chip shortage has strained Intel’s PC-chip segment, making a move to Nvidia a potentially attractive escape route.
Former Salesforce co-CEO and OpenAI board chair Bret Taylor is highlighted for his crisis-management reputation. His career spans co-creating Google Maps, serving as Facebook’s chief technology officer, and overseeing Twitter’s board during its sale to Elon Musk. After the abrupt removal and rapid reinstatement of Sam Altman at OpenAI, Taylor assumed the board chairmanship, positioning him as a familiar figure to many of Nvidia’s key customers.
Within Nvidia, senior vice president Ian Buck is mentioned as a plausible internal successor. Buck helped develop the CUDA software platform that underpins the company’s dominance in artificial-intelligence workloads. Analysts and former employees have suggested his name, and Kalshi assigns him a middling probability of taking the top job, reflecting his technical credibility despite limited public visibility.
Other insiders under consideration include Andrew Bell, senior vice president of hardware engineering who joined Nvidia as a Cornell graduate twenty-five years ago, and CFO Colette Kress, who is frequently named but is not viewed as an innovative visionary. A more unconventional suggestion is Lori Huang, Jensen’s spouse, who studied micro-chip engineering at Oregon State and Silicon Graphics before focusing on family trusts, offering continuity and technical expertise should the board favor a familiar, low-profile leader.