Nvidia’s board is preparing to oust Jensen Huang, and the company still has no named successor if it does. The market moved fast on that prospect: Nvidia fell 8.6% after hours to $158.76 at 7:55 PM ET, trimming roughly $673 billion in market value in a week.
The timing matters because the report landed on Wednesday evening, when traders were already weighing what a change at the top would mean for a company valued at $3.83 trillion. A board meeting could come as soon as Wednesday night, but there was no confirmation that any meeting had actually taken place or that any decision had been made.
That is why the succession question has snapped into focus around Ian Buck. He runs Nvidia’s hyperscale and high-performance computing business, has been at the company for about two decades and helped architect CUDA, the software layer that keeps customers on Nvidia’s chips because code written for it does not simply run on rival chips without work. In a Time essay, the authors behind Yale’s CEO leadership forums called him both an admired tech superstar and a hugely strong replacement.
Others in the conversation include CFO Colette Kress, AMD’s Lisa Su and Arm’s Rene Haas, but the friction point is unchanged: Nvidia has no formal successor in place even as the board is said to be moving against the founder who has led it from the start. Gil Luria said Huang being removed immediately could be challenging because the company does not have a succession plan in place.
Robotics engineer Dennis Hong sharpened the speculation on Wednesday afternoon, writing on X that it was probably going to be Buck. That view fits the logic of the business as much as the rumor mill: if the board wants continuity in Nvidia’s core AI franchise, it may look first to the executive who helped build the company’s technical moat from the inside. What remains unanswered is whether the board actually meets, whether Huang is pushed aside, and whether Buck is the name that turns talk into a handoff.
