Huang, who co-founded Nvidia in 1993, acknowledged in a November 8 email to staff that he had been unfaithful to his wife. Nvidia’s board said it had opened an independent investigation into reports that he was the target of a foreign intelligence effort and said it had no reason to believe US national security or company secrets had been compromised. The New York Times subsequently reported an alleged second affair involving an Nvidia executive who reported to Huang.

If Huang leaves, the board could turn to a familiar executive to run Nvidia while it decides who should lead the company long term. Kress and Buck stood out among the analysts and investors Reuters spoke to, while Bloomberg’s rundown also pointed to executives from the chip and cloud computing industries.

Kress has been Nvidia’s finance chief since 2013 and regularly joins Huang on quarterly earnings calls. That gives investors a familiar voice if the board needs an interim CEO. Some directors favour Kress for that role, Semafor reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

Buck joined Nvidia in 2004 and helped develop CUDA, the software that lets developers use Nvidia’s graphics chips for tasks such as training and running AI models. He now oversees AI hardware and software for large data centre customers. Shay Boloor, chief market strategist at Futurum Equities, told Reuters that Buck was Nvidia’s strongest long-term internal option if a transition became necessary.

Haas worked at Nvidia before joining Arm, the chip design company he has led since 2022. He has experience running a listed technology company whose customers include major chipmakers. Boloor also singled him out to Reuters as an external candidate worth considering.

Su has led Advanced Micro Devices since 2014. AMD sells processors for servers and AI accelerators that compete with Nvidia’s, giving Su experience selling chips to many of the same data centre customers.

Srouji joined Apple in 2008 to lead development of processors for the iPhone. That work laid the foundation for the custom chips Apple now uses across its products. His current role covers both chip development and the hardware engineering that goes into the devices those chips power.

Garman has led Amazon’s cloud computing division since June 2024. AWS gives companies access to computing power through its data centres, making Garman familiar with how cloud providers buy and deploy the kind of chips Nvidia sells. Business Insider reported that industry observers had floated his name as a potential successor.

Mehrotra has led Micron since 2017. His experience is in memory chips, including the high-bandwidth memory used alongside AI processors to move large volumes of data quickly. That gives him a view of a part of the AI supply chain that Nvidia depends on.

Vahdat’s team works across Google’s custom chips, data centres and networks. He has helped develop Google’s tensor processing units, or TPUs, which the company uses to train and run AI models and offers to customers through Google Cloud.

Caprez, Huang’s son-in-law, works with specialist cloud providers and on data centre deployments, according to Bloomberg’s rundown. His role puts him close to the companies building AI infrastructure with Nvidia’s chips.

 - With inputs from Agencies