Who could replace Jensen Huang? A highly unscientific list of possible successors

TechCrunch's parlor game ran Wednesday evening, as prediction-market odds on Huang surviving the week sat around 30%. It names AMD's Lisa Su, Eric Schmidt, Intel's Lip-Bu Tan, Sierra's Bret Taylor, Nvidia's Ian Buck and Andrew Bell, and, as a wild card, Huang's wife Lori Huang. By Thursday morning, Huang had resigned and the board had named CFO Colette Kress interim CEO.

The list is playful by design. But it is useful because it shows how few obvious answers there are. Nvidia had no apparent succession plan, and the most powerful chip company in AI is now picking its first new leader in more than three decades.

We like this piece most as a map of archetypes rather than a forecast. Each name stands for a different idea of what Nvidia needs. Buck, who helped develop CUDA, is the builder: the person who understands why developers are locked into Nvidia's software. Taylor is the steady hand, the person boards call when they need calm and customer relationships. Tan and Su are chip veterans running rival companies. Schmidt is the government-and-scale figure, with baggage TechCrunch itself flags.

Our view is that the builder case is stronger than it looks. Nvidia's moat is not only silicon. It is the software ecosystem that keeps the AI industry writing for its hardware. A leader who protects and opens up that ecosystem matters more to developers than a famous name. The risk of an insider, though, is continuity of the wrong kind: a culture where one person held 60 direct reports and few checks.

We are skeptical of the rival-CEO picks for exactly the reason the piece gives. Su's company benefits every day Nvidia is distracted. Competition is healthy here. A world where AMD and Intel stay independent and push hard is better for everyone buying chips than one where the same small circle of executives rotates through the top jobs.

One caution. Using prediction-market odds as a running scoreboard for a person's career makes good copy, but it turns a governance decision into a betting event. The board's job is to choose for the next decade, not the next headline. With the board now under an independent chair for the first time, we will be watching whether it picks for accountability as much as for vision.

The list was published before the resignation, when TechCrunch speculated Huang might stay on as chairman, a role Nvidia did not then have. The board instead appointed former Synopsys CEO Harvey C. Jones as its first chair, according to The Verge, and Huang left the board entirely.