Who Will Run Nvidia? Polymarket's Favorites, and Four Dark Horses Nobody Is Pricing

Polymarket prices as of 12:13 p.m. ET, Sunday, November 15. We will update this piece as the search moves.

Nvidia's board says it is still "in the process of selecting a search firm" and has "not formally engaged any potential candidates" (CNBC). Traders are not waiting. About $2.2 million has traded across the 25 names in Polymarket's market on who succeeds Jensen Huang (Polymarket).

Huang resigned on November 12. CFO Colette Kress is interim CEO and remains CFO, and longtime director Harvey Jones became the board's first chair (Nvidia). On Sunday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the board should "go outside the company" and that Nvidia needs "a dramatic shakeup." He also wants the board and its outside counsel to answer questions about export-control compliance within 10 days (Reuters). The Washington Post reports that Huang is quietly helping with the search and has called at least one potential candidate (via Polymarket) (single source).

At a glance

• Favorite: Arm CEO Rene Haas at 25.7%, then Nvidia's Ian Buck at 22.5% and Kress at 11.9% (Polymarket).
• Kalshi agrees on the order: Haas 25%, Buck 18%, Kress 10% at midday Saturday (GeekWire).
• Timing: 22.5% that a permanent CEO is named by December 31 (Polymarket).
• The boomerang: 10.25% that Huang takes any formal role at Nvidia again by year-end, 29.5% by the end of 2027 (Polymarket).
• Our dark horses: Synopsys CEO Sassine Ghazi, Arista CEO Jayshree Ullal, Tenstorrent CEO Jim Keller and former NSA director Paul Nakasone. None is on Polymarket's board or in the candidate lists we reviewed.

What the market is pricing

Each "Yes" share pays $1 if that person is the first successor Nvidia announces by the end of 2028. Interim CEOs do not count (Polymarket). Prices are what traders will pay, not forecasts, and many names trade thinly.

The lead changed hands on Friday. Buck, who helped create CUDA and runs Nvidia's hyperscale and high-performance computing business, led for most of Thursday and Friday morning and peaked at 37.5% on Thursday afternoon. Haas jumped after the Financial Times reported that the board had approached him (FT), and he has traded between 19% and 29% since.

Source: Polymarket, "Next CEO of NVIDIA?" market, 12:13 p.m. ET Nov. 15. Traded is each contract's lifetime volume. The other 16 names are each at 2% or less.

Kress's price says less than it seems. She already has the job on an interim basis, and the market pays only on a permanent appointment.

The outsider gap

Polymarket runs a second market on whether the next CEO comes from inside or outside. Board members count as insiders, and a co-CEO pair counts as external if either one is. It prices "external" at 55% and "internal" at 35.5%, with 8.3% on no permanent CEO by 2028 (Polymarket).

Add up the 25 named candidates instead and, rescaled to 100%, insiders come to 42.5% and outsiders to 47.6%. So the inside-or-outside market gives outsiders about 8 points more than the named outsiders add up to, and insiders about 7 points less.

There are two readings. Traders may be paying for an outsider who is not on the list, which is the gap our dark horses would fill. Or Buck is expensive relative to the market's own view of insider odds. Treat it as a hint: the inside-or-outside market has traded about $34,000, 1.6% of the candidate market's volume.

The frontrunners

• Rene Haas, Arm. He spent about seven years at Nvidia and still has a strong relationship with Huang and some board members (FT). He was also vice president of sales at Tensilica, a chip-design company that chair Harvey Jones co-founded and chaired (GeekWire). The catch: SoftBank named him CEO of its international business in April (GeekWire).
• Ian Buck, Nvidia. He joined in 2004 and helped lead CUDA, the software that keeps developers on Nvidia's chips (Reuters). SemiAnalysis's Dylan Patel favors him among insiders for his charisma and dealmaking (TMT Breakout). He has never been a CEO, and Bessent's call for an outsider works against every insider.
• Colette Kress, Nvidia. CFO since 2013 and now interim CEO (Nvidia). eToro's Josh Gilbert calls her the obvious choice to steady the ship but expects the board to want an engineer for the permanent job (Reuters).
• Johny Srouji, Apple, and Charlie Kawwas, Broadcom. Patel's external picks, the only two he says can handle both the supply chain and the technical detail (TMT Breakout). Semafor reported Srouji is being considered (Business Insider).
• Tim Cook, Apple. President Trump wrote "A Legend replaces a Legend!" (Business Insider). Nothing disclosed shows Cook wants the job (24/7 Wall St. via Yahoo Finance).
• Lisa Su, AMD. The FT names her as one of the few outsiders who could step in (FT), but she may prefer to compete with a weakened Nvidia (Axios).
• Also floated: Google Cloud's Thomas Kurian, AWS's Matt Garman and Peter DeSantis, Micron's Sanjay Mehrotra, Marvell's Matt Murphy, Google's Amin Vahdat and Intel's Lip-Bu Tan, among others (Axios, GeekWire, NDTV, Il Sole 24 Ore, TechCrunch).

What the job now requires

In October, Huang said he hoped his successor was already inside the company (GeekWire). The brief has changed since. Four demands stand out:

• Technical authority. Patel sees no clear technical lead after Huang besides, possibly, Jonah Alben (TMT Breakout).
• Supply-chain pull. Patel says Huang's personal pull lets Nvidia lock up 60% to 70% of a supplier's capacity at below-market prices, and a less charismatic successor likely loses that (TMT Breakout).
• Washington. Bessent wants an outsider and compliance answers within 10 days (Reuters). AI companies are hiring former intelligence officers as the scandal spotlights espionage risk (Reuters).
• Integrity. Any candidate needs an impeccable record for integrity and honesty, recruiter Jeff Christian and others told the Times (The New York Times).

Four dark horses

We screened chip, networking, design-software and national-security leaders against those demands. Then we checked each name against Polymarket's 25 and the candidate lists from Axios, GeekWire, TechCrunch, Business Insider, Reuters, NDTV and Il Sole 24 Ore. These four appear in none of them. Nothing suggests the board has contacted any of them.

Sassine Ghazi, Synopsys: the chairman's network

Ghazi started as a design engineer at Intel and joined Synopsys in 1998 as an applications engineer. He became president in 2021 and CEO in January 2024 (Synopsys 10-K). He is 55 (Synopsys proxy).

Why he fits: Nvidia's new chair, Harvey Jones, was once Synopsys' CEO and executive chairman (Nvidia). Nvidia already owns a stake: it bought $2 billion of Synopsys stock at $414.79 a share in December 2025 (Synopsys). Synopsys also lives under U.S. export rules on chip-design software, which it says have hurt its China business (Synopsys 10-K). That is compliance experience Nvidia now needs.

Why not: He has never run a hardware company or a supply chain like Nvidia's, and design software is a different business.

Jayshree Ullal, Arista Networks: the operator

Ullal has been Arista's CEO since October 2008 and its chair since December 2023. Before that she spent nearly 15 years at Cisco, finishing as senior vice president of its data center, switching and services group (Arista proxy).

Why she fits: She has 18 years as a CEO, and AI clusters increasingly turn on networking, where Arista competes head-on with Nvidia. Arista's annual report names InfiniBand and NVLink, "often sold as part of a vertical solution along with the GPUs from Nvidia," as competition (Arista 10-K).

Why not: She would leave the company she built for a rival, and she has no Nvidia history.

Jim Keller, Tenstorrent: the architect

Keller was chief cores architect at AMD, chief architect at P.A. Semi, which Apple bought, Tesla's vice president of Autopilot hardware and head of Intel's silicon engineering group (Tenstorrent). Tenstorrent raised $1.5 billion in October at a $6.2 billion valuation (SiliconANGLE).

Why he fits: If the board wants technical authority above all, few outsiders have more. Tenstorrent designs both its chips and the software that runs on them, the same pairing that made CUDA Nvidia's moat.

Why not: He has never run a large public company, and he is building a rival.

Paul Nakasone, former NSA director: the Washington answer

Nakasone ran the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command from 2018 until February 2024 (SecurityWeek). He sits on OpenAI's board and is founding director of Vanderbilt's Institute of National Security (The Spokesman-Review). In August he launched the Nakasone Group, an advisory firm he chairs (SecurityWeek).

Why he fits: The scandal is now a national-security story. Few people could answer Bessent's compliance questions with more credibility.

Why not: He has never run a company. He would also likely need to leave OpenAI's board, since OpenAI runs mostly on Nvidia compute (TMT Breakout). The realistic version is a pairing: Nakasone as chair or co-CEO beside a technical leader. Under Polymarket's rules, that pairing would resolve "external."

Our scorecard

We rated 12 candidates from 1 to 5 on six criteria, weighted toward technical depth (25%), supply chain and dealmaking (20%) and Washington and compliance credibility (20%). Scale-operator experience gets 15%, Nvidia knowledge 10% and willingness to take the job 10%. The ratings are our judgment, not reported facts. Change any weight or rating in the model below.

On our weights, Su is the best fit on paper and the least likely to say yes. Buck and Haas come next, close to where the market has them. Ullal and Ghazi score above Kawwas, Cook and Srouji. Nakasone ranks last as a solo CEO, which is why we see him only in a pairing.

Download the Nvidia CEO succession scorecard (Excel)Our 12-candidate scorecard with editable weights and ratings, plus every Polymarket price and volume behind the outsider-gap math.Download · Free

What to watch

• Tue., Nov. 17: Third-quarter results at about 1:20 p.m. PT and the call at 2 p.m. PT, the first without Huang (Nvidia).
• Wed., Nov. 18: Kress holds a company-wide meeting at noon ET (via @DeItaone).
• Around Wed., Nov. 25: Bessent's 10-day window for answers on compliance closes (Reuters).
• The search firm: The board has not picked one yet (CNBC). That pick starts the real clock.
• Hearings: Congressional dates for Huang and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick are in our live timeline.

How we did this

Polymarket prices and volumes come from the "Next CEO of NVIDIA?", "Next NVIDIA CEO: internal or external?", "New NVIDIA CEO named by December 31, 2026?" and "Jensen Huang rejoins NVIDIA by...?" markets as of 12:13 p.m. ET on November 15. The chart uses hourly price checks. For the outsider gap we counted Nick Parker, who joined Nvidia in August, as internal and co-founder Curtis Priem as external, and rescaled each market so its prices sum to 100%. Biographies come from company filings and the sources linked. Scorecard ratings and weights are our assumptions. Items marked single source rest on one outlet and have not been confirmed.