The next Nvidia CEO is more likely to be the engineer who invented CUDA than the finance chief now running the company, if the first money on the question is right. At 10:11 a.m. Eastern on T
The next Nvidia CEO is more likely to be the engineer who invented CUDA than the finance chief now running the company, if the first money on the question is right. At 10:11 a.m. Eastern on Thursday, less than two hours after Jensen Huang resigned, Polymarket’s “Next CEO of NVIDIA?” market priced Ian Buck at about 32% and interim chief Colette Kress at about 25%.
Set against Wall Street, that book is a contradiction. Analyst Dan Ives told CNBC the company will probably need someone from outside for the long term. Traders give the outsiders they have priced about 12% combined, led by Arm chief executive Rene Haas near 7% and AMD’s Lisa Su near 2%. Two insiders hold 57%. This desk pulled the order books from Polymarket’s public API rather than relying on the odds circulating on X.
The contract pays on the first person officially announced as Huang’s permanent successor, and interim appointments do not count. Kress’s 25% is therefore the price of her keeping the job, not of holding it today. About $436,000 has traded since the market listed on 10 November. A sister contract puts even odds on a permanent chief being named by 31 December. A third gives a 58% chance that Nvidia still closes 2026 with a market value above $4 trillion.
Nvidia’s board has said only that its search will consider internal and external candidates. Analysts cited in CNBC’s live coverage have pointed to internal names including Kress, Buck, deep-learning vice president Bryan Catanzaro, chief technology officer Michael Kagan and chief scientist Bill Dally. Polymarket puts Kagan below 3% and Dally below 1%, and does not list Catanzaro at all. Buck’s edge is his record. Nvidia’s own biography credits him as the inventor of CUDA, the GPU-computing standard used by millions of developers, and he heads product for the hyperscale business that works with Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta.
“To steady the ship, she’s the one,” Dan Ives, analyst at Yorkville Ives & Co., told CNBC of Kress before the resignation was announced. “But longer term, probably someone from the outside.” Ives expects her to hold the interim role for about a year, which sits awkwardly beside even odds on a named successor within seven weeks. From crypto, the verdict on the board was blunter. “It’s a mistake for Nvidia to let Jensen resign,” Binance founder Changpeng Zhao wrote on X.
For brokers and trading desks, the successor book is a signal, not a hedge. It carries about $288,000 of liquidity against a company worth roughly $3.9 trillion. It is 2% of the size of the $22.5 million market on Huang’s exit, where $7.1 million traded on an 11 November deadline that lapsed about nine hours before the announcement.
The risk transfer happened elsewhere. Nvidia shares opened at $151.01, set a 52-week low of $148.80 and traded near $160 at 10:11 a.m., down almost 8%, CNBC data showed. The NVDA perpetual on Hyperliquid turned over about $2 billion in 24 hours, the venue’s data showed. Our earlier coverage has the resignation and the overnight repricing, the moves in AMD, Broadcom and the neoclouds, and the board’s deliberations on Wednesday.
The next catalyst is Tuesday, 17 November, when Nvidia reports fiscal third-quarter results with Kress as both interim chief executive and finance chief. A clean quarter delivered without Huang should lift her contract, because every steady print weakens the case for an outside hire. A stumble, or word that the board has retained a search firm, would move money toward Buck and the outsiders. With a book this thin, one confident buyer can shift the odds by several points, so the levels are best read as a live poll of informed opinion rather than a forecast with capital behind it.
