Meet Ian Buck: The NVIDIA Executive Insiders Believe Is the One Man Who Can Replace Jensen Huang
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Nvidia’s (NASDAQ: NVDA) board is preparing to oust CEO Jensen Huang and could meet as soon as Wednesday night, The Wall Street Journal reported at 5:27 PM ET, after a New York Times report that Huang had a relationship with Nvidia executive Kimberly Powell. Nvidia has not commented. The stock was at $158.76 in after-hours trading at 7:55 PM ET, down 8.6% from Wednesday’s close and 14.9% since the November 6 close, the last before Huang admitted an affair. That is about $673 billion of market value gone in a week.
Which puts one question ahead of all the others: who runs a $3.83 trillion company that has never had any CEO but its founder? Nvidia has never named a successor. “Mr. Huang being removed immediately could be challenging for Nvidia since it does not have a succession plan in place,” Gil Luria of D.A. Davidson told Reuters on Wednesday. Among the people who know the company’s inner workings, one name keeps coming up: Ian Buck.
Who Ian Buck is
Buck runs Nvidia’s hyperscale and high-performance computing business, the part of the company that sells to the giant cloud and AI customers whose data center spending made Nvidia the most valuable chipmaker in the world. He has been at Nvidia for about two decades. Before that, as a Stanford Ph.D. student, he built Brook, one of the first programming languages for running general computing work on graphics chips. At Nvidia he became a key architect of CUDA, the software platform that lets developers write programs for Nvidia’s chips.
CUDA is the reason Nvidia’s customers find it hard to leave. Millions of developers write for it, and code written for CUDA does not run on rival chips without work. Analysts call it Nvidia’s moat. Buck helped dig it.
Why his name keeps coming up
“It’s probably going to be Ian Buck,” robotics engineer Dennis Hong wrote on X on Wednesday afternoon. “Been there for two decades and a key architect of CUDA. Arguably the most interesting and probable candidate because he understands the technology moat, and not just the financial model.”
The authors behind Yale’s CEO leadership forums went further in an essay for Time published Wednesday evening, calling Buck “an admired tech superstar” with “strong relationships with NVIDIA’s largest customers.” They wrote that he “would be a hugely strong replacement who brings the right technical expertise, customer relationships, experience, and employee relationships for the role,” and that he “has garnered influential endorsements as the next CEO from several key commentators, including Jim Cramer.” International Business Times reported Monday that Buck has been mentioned in outside successor discussions because of his technical background and his experience running Nvidia’s accelerated computing business.
That combination is the case for him. Huang’s value to Nvidia rests on two things: he understands the chips and software better than almost anyone, and the biggest buyers of AI computing trust him. Buck is one of the few Nvidia executives who checks both boxes.
The other names
Buck is not the only candidate in the conversation.
- Colette Kress, Nvidia’s chief financial officer since 2013, is the executive investors know best, and the Time essay suggested she and Buck could even share the job as interim co-CEOs. Analysts quoted by Axios said her career in finance makes her a less natural fit for the technical side of Huang’s role.
- Lisa Su, AMD’s CEO, and Rene Haas, Arm’s CEO, are outside names The Information floated, according to Benzinga. Either would mean hiring the chief of a rival or a key supplier.
- Tim Cook and Eric Schmidt were named in the Time essay as outside leaders who have succeeded or steadied famous founders.
Baird analysts wrote Wednesday that a CEO change was growing more likely and that they would favor an outside hire. The board has not said what it will do, and Nvidia has not designated any executive as Huang’s replacement.
Why it matters for shareholders
Dan Ives of Yorkville Ives has estimated that Nvidia would be worth 25% to 30% less without Huang. At the after-hours price, that is roughly $958 billion to $1,150 billion of market value. A successor the market already trusts on the technology and with the customers is the most direct way to shrink that number, which is why a name like Buck’s matters as much as the board’s decision on Huang.
When McDonald’s fired CEO Steve Easterbrook in 2019, it named his successor in the same announcement, and the stock was up 14.7% a year later. When Intel’s Brian Krzanich resigned in 2018 with no successor ready, Intel ran on an interim CEO for seven months and trailed the S&P 500 by 17 points over the next year. For Nvidia holders, how quickly the board names a credible leader may matter more than who it is.
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