3 Indian-origin CEOs in race to replace Jensen Huang as Nvidia chief

The company has appointed chief financial officer Colette Kress as interim CEO

Three Indian-origin technology executives, Sanjay Mehrotra, Nikesh Arora and Thomas Kurian, are among the names emerging in discussions over who could succeed Jensen Huang as chief executive of Nvidia after the chipmaker's co-founder stepped down with immediate effect on Thursday. Mehrotra, CEO of Micron Technology, Arora, who heads cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks, and Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, feature among the potential contenders as Nvidia begins looking for a permanent replacement for Huang, who led the company for more than three decades, as per multiple reports. Nvidia announced Huang's resignation amid mounting scrutiny over reports of multiple extramarital affairs. Chief financial officer Colette Kress has taken over as interim CEO, while the company said its board would consider both internal and external candidates. Longtime director Harvey Jones has also been appointed as Nvidia's first-ever board chairman. According to Bloomberg, Nvidia has engaged an outside firm to identify potential candidates for the position. The search is expected to be challenging, given Huang's central role in transforming the company from a graphics chipmaker into one of the world's most valuable technology firms and a dominant supplier of artificial intelligence processors. Mehrotra brings decades of semiconductor industry experience to the discussion. He has led Micron through the industry's boom-and-bust cycles, with the company's shares rising more than 2,700% during his tenure, driven in part by surging demand for memory chips linked to AI infrastructure. Arora has led Palo Alto Networks since 2018, overseeing its expansion in AI-powered cybersecurity. Before joining the company, he served as president and chief operating officer of SoftBank and spent a decade at Google. Kurian, meanwhile, heads Google Cloud, one of the major players in the global cloud computing and artificial intelligence market. His responsibilities span cloud infrastructure, enterprise software and AI services, giving him experience managing large-scale technology operations and relationships with major corporate customers.

Other names in the succession discussion include Nvidia CFO Kress and vice-president Ian Buck, who helped develop CUDA, the software platform that made Nvidia's graphics processors central to modern AI computing. External possibilities include Arm CEO Rene Haas and Apple's chief hardware officer Johny Srouji.

What we know about Huang's resignation Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has resigned with immediate effect following reports of multiple extramarital affairs, including one involving a businesswoman suspected by US intelligence agencies of being a Chinese spy. The company has appointed chief financial officer Colette Kress as interim CEO while considering internal and external candidates for a permanent replacement. Huang, who co-founded Nvidia in 1993, apologised to his wife, children and employees, admitting he had been “unfaithful to my wife”. The allegations have triggered national security concerns and calls for investigations in the US. Nvidia has maintained that there is no reason to believe its secrets or national security were compromised.