NVIDIA's top board candidate says he would rather die than take over as CEO.

Semiconductor research firm SemiAnalysis released a research note on Jensen Huang's resignation, noting that while the board has appointed Colette Kress as interim CEO, it prefers the permanent CEO to not have a finance background, so the search for a permanent CEO remains ongoing. Internal tech-focused candidates include Ian Buck (who founded CUDA during his Stanford PhD, joined NVIDIA in 2004 and leads its data center business) and Jonah Alben (who joined in 1997 and is senior vice president of GPU engineering). A senior executive said, "Ian would rather die than take over from Jensen", adding, "Nobody actually wants that job". The analysis points out that both are highly capable, but may lack the supply chain management control Jensen Huang possesses.