Colette Kress, Nvidia's chief financial officer since 2013, took over as interim CEO on Thursday while the board searches for a permanent successor to Jensen Huang. She retains the CFO role during the search, which new board chair Harvey Jones is expected to lead.

The recruitment market for this job is thin. Scott W. Simmons, co-managing partner of executive search firm Crist Kolder Associates and a near-30-year veteran of executive recruiting, told Fortune: "Colette is very much the right interim CEO." He added: "There's such a small pool to fish in when you think about people capable of stepping into this." Simmons expects the board to seek a technologist as Huang's permanent successor, possibly from outside the company.

Who leads the external shortlist?

Shay Boloor, chief market strategist at The Futurum Group, backs Arm CEO Rene Haas. "He spent seven years at Nvidia and understands Jensen's culture; and what makes him interesting is that Nvidia's Grace and Vera CPUs run on Arm architecture," Boloor wrote in an X post. "So while he missed [the] rise of NVLink, Mellanox and rack-scale AI he understands [the] CPU side of Nvidia's platform better than almost anyone else on the outside."

Sam Sugarman, who co-founded and leads the VC/PE secondaries practice (funds that buy existing private stakes) at Concordia Capital, also listed Haas among external candidates. Haas brings Nvidia experience plus public-company leadership, having steered Arm through its 2023 IPO and beyond processor licensing. His background spans engineering, product strategy and sales.

One gap stands out: Haas left Nvidia in 2013, before the company became the dominant force in AI computing. The board must judge whether running Arm, a far smaller business, has prepared him for Nvidia's scale and complexity.

Why is Lisa Su's name in play?

Sugarman also flagged AMD CEO Lisa Su — who is, coincidentally, a distant cousin of Huang's. Su offers semiconductor engineering credentials and a proven turnaround record: since taking AMD's helm in 2014, she has made it a formidable processor maker and a challenger to Nvidia in AI chips. The obstacle is practical. Recruiting her means persuading a sitting CEO to abandon the company she rebuilt.

What do the big-name outsiders offer?

Dan Ives, partner and senior managing director at Yorkville Ives & Co., told Fortune he sees former Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google Cloud CEO Tom Kurian, and Palo Alto Networks chairman and CEO Nikesh Arora "as the top three external candidates for Nvidia's CEO role."

• Tim Cook has done what few executives have: succeeded a technology company's defining leader, taking over from Steve Jobs and running Apple for 15 years before becoming executive chairman in September. His supply-chain mastery fits Nvidia, Apple's decade of in-house processor development gives him chip exposure, and his international relationships would matter amid geopolitical pressure. Two caveats: his continuing Apple chairmanship complicates recruitment, though he has one high-profile backer — President Trump posted on Truth Social Thursday that Cook should replace Huang.
• Tom Kurian connects directly to Nvidia's AI infrastructure business through the Google Cloud partnership. He spent 22 years at Oracle, rising to president of product development, before joining Google Cloud in 2019. The open question is whether selling and operating AI infrastructure translates into leading the chipmaker that builds it.
• Nikesh Arora offers sitting-CEO experience across enterprise technology, global sales and investment. He was president and COO of SoftBank and chief business officer at Google before joining Palo Alto Networks in 2018. His case depends on whether Nvidia wants a strategist who builds around its technical leaders rather than a technologist himself.

What does this change for Nvidia?

Nothing operationally, yet. Kress provides continuity in the interim role, and no timeline for the search has been disclosed. Every candidate carries a material flaw — outdated Nvidia knowledge, dual commitments, or a customer's perspective rather than a maker's. As Simmons's remark suggests, the scarcity of qualified leaders, not the abundance of them, defines this succession. The board's choice will determine Nvidia's fate; on the evidence so far, no candidate arrives without a caveat attached.