If Jensen Huang steps down, who will succeed him? Even executives, children, and sons-in-law were mentioned.

If Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang steps down as his future becomes uncertain due to his affair with a woman accused of being a Chinese spy, attention is focused on the next succession structure.

Business Insider reported on the 9th (local time) that a variety of internal and external candidates are being discussed both inside and outside NVIDIA, including Wall Street analysts and former executives and employees, regarding CEO Hwang's successor.

The first person to be considered among the internal candidates is Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Colette Kress. Gil Luria, an analyst at DA Davidson, a financial investment company, predicted that CFO Kress is the only high-ranking executive exposed to the outside world and that he will likely take on the CEO position temporarily if CEO Hwang steps down.

CFO Kress has led Nvidia's finances for 13 years after working in the finance departments of Cisco and Microsoft (MS).

However, some say that CFO Kress, who is a finance official, does not have an engineering background and is therefore unsuitable to lead a cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductor company.

For this reason, Vice President Ian Buck, who led the development of NVIDIA's core software and platform, 'CUDA', is also being mentioned as a successor.

He has worked at NVIDIA for 22 years and is currently in charge of the data center and computing division.

One former employee pointed out of Vice President Buck, "He is already leading the department that generates virtually all of the company's revenue."

Given that CEO Hwang has placed his family at the center of Nvidia's management for many years, his children and sons-in-law are also being mentioned as candidates.

The target audience is daughter Madison Hwang, who serves as senior director of physical AI product marketing, son Spencer Hwang, director of robotics product management, and Vice President Nico Caprez, son-in-law who recently married Madison Hwang.

There is also the possibility of suddenly recruiting outside personnel.

Yale University professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld publicly mentioned former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and some are also mentioning top executives of Nvidia's major customers as candidates.

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian and Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Matt Garman, who understand the overall AI ecosystem, are also evaluated as suitable candidates.

However, experts believe that no matter who takes over, it will be difficult to replace CEO Hwang's unrivaled influence.

Brad Gastworth, head of global research at Circular Technology, observed that CEO Hwang will have enormous influence in the succession process because he holds the largest individual stake, 3.56%.

Nvidia has yet dismissed rumors of Jensen Huang's resignation, saying he will continue to lead the company as CEO.