Kalshi traders split on Nvidia’s next chief after Huang resignation

Prediction markets rapidly shifted from assessing whether Jensen Huang would leave Nvidia to weighing a wide-open contest to replace him after the founder resigned as chief executive, president and board member on Nov. 12. Nvidia named its chief financial officer, Colette Kress, interim CEO while it searches for a permanent leader from internal and external candidates.

Kalshi’s own Nov. 12 market snapshot put Ian Buck, Nvidia’s vice president of hyperscale and high-performance computing, at 42%, ahead of Kress at 12%. Neither candidate exceeded 50%, underscoring the absence of a clear market consensus. As reported on Nov. 11, Kalshi traders had priced an imminent Huang departure as increasingly likely before his resignation.

A later Motley Fool account of Kalshi trading showed materially different prices: Buck at about 36%, Kress at 19%, Arm Holdings chief executive Rene Haas at 10% and former Apple chief executive Tim Cook at roughly 4%. Kalshi’s report separately put Apple hardware chief Johny Srouji, the leading external candidate in that snapshot, at 9%, while Haas stood at 7%.

The differing figures reflect rapidly changing trading rather than confirmed knowledge of Nvidia’s boardroom deliberations. Kalshi said Buck’s probability climbed from nearly 23% at 8:50 a.m. Eastern Time to 42%, while Kress’s fell from almost 49% to 12%. Prediction-market odds can move sharply, particularly where liquidity is limited.

Buck joined Nvidia in 2004 and helped develop CUDA, the software platform that enabled GPUs to be programmed for uses beyond graphics. His role now covers hyperscale and high-performance computing, a central customer area for Nvidia: Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Oracle accounted for $48.7 billion of the company’s fiscal second-quarter data-centre revenue. Bloomberg, as cited by Kalshi, noted that Buck lacks the operational experience investors often seek in the head of a large public company.

Kress’s appointment puts Nvidia’s chief financial officer in charge during the transition, although Kalshi noted that CFOs are often installed to provide short-term stability rather than chosen as permanent successors. Haas ran Nvidia’s computing-products business from 2006 to 2013 before becoming Arm’s chief executive. Nvidia attempted to acquire Arm in 2020.

The board also appointed Harvey C. Jones as its first chair. The transition follows an unusually concentrated leadership structure under Huang, with about 60 executives reporting directly to him and no obvious successor after his 33 years running the company. Nvidia shares fell 13% in early Wall Street trading after the resignation was announced.

Huang’s exit followed reports about personal relationships and possible foreign-intelligence exposure, which had prompted an independent board investigation. He had built Nvidia from a graphics-chip maker into a leading supplier of AI computing infrastructure, and the company’s Blackwell and Vera Rubin platforms, proprietary networking technology and CUDA ecosystem remain competitive barriers despite the leadership change.

Kalshi traders assigned a 13% chance that Nvidia would name a permanent CEO before Dec. 16 and a 63% chance of an announcement before Feb. 1, 2027.