What will happen after Jensen Huang's resignation? Nvidia's next move, explained - Geo News

With Jensen Huang’s resignation, the issue of who will take charge of the AI semiconductor powerhouse company is now among the biggest succession challenges in the technology world. 

Without a clear successor yet, industry experts and prediction markets are already naming potential replacements for Nvidia’s leader.

Ian Buck is considered as the top internal candidate. Having the role of Vice President and General Manager of Hyperscale and High-Performance Computing at Nvidia, Ian Buck is popularly known to be the inventor of CUDA, the software that gave rise to today’s GPUs used in AI.

With over 22 years working with Nvidia, Ian Buck started his career in 2004. Currently, he runs Nvidia's multibillion-dollar data center, cloud, and AI business. An alumnus of Princeton University and Stanford University with his Ph.D., Buck invented Brook, a predecessor of general-purpose GPU computing.

Jay Puri is another one of those experienced people. The Indian-born executive moved to Senior Adviser at Nvidia after retiring in August 2026 from the job as Executive Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations, where he worked from 2005 to 2026. 

Puri was in charge of worldwide sales and partner alliances at the company. Prior to Nvidia, he spent 22 years at Sun Microsystems. Puri graduated from the University of Minnesota, Caltech, and Harvard Business School.

Among others mentioned were AMD CEO Lisa Su, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, Nvidia hardware engineering SVP Andrew Bell, and CFO Colette Kress.

Nvidia stock price dropped by over 8% during the after-hours trading on November 11. The company board has already started an independent inquiry and does not think its secrets were disclosed.