Prediction Markets Make Ian Buck Favorite Over Colette Kress for Nvidia CEO

Polymarket priced CUDA inventor Ian Buck at roughly 32% to become Nvidia's next chief executive, against about 25% for interim chief Colette Kress, less than two hours after Jensen Huang resigned. The reading came at 10:11 a.m. Eastern on Thursday, drawn from the prediction market's public order books rather than the odds circulating on X.

The money contradicts Wall Street. Analyst Dan Ives told CNBC the company will probably need an outsider for the long term. Traders give all priced external candidates about 12% combined, led by Arm chief executive Rene Haas near 7% and AMD's Lisa Su near 2%. The two insiders, Buck and Kress, hold 57% between them.

What does the market actually price?

The contract pays on the first person officially named as Huang's permanent successor. Interim appointments do not count. Kress's 25% is therefore the price of her keeping the job permanently, not of holding it today.

The book is thin. About $436,000 has traded since the market listed on 10 November. A sister contract offers even odds on a permanent chief being named by 31 December. A third contract 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. That statement commits it to nothing. 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.

The market is dismissive of most of them. Polymarket puts Kagan below 3% and Dally below 1%. Catanzaro is not listed 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 serving Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta.

What did the named analysts say?

"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. That view 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.

A signal, not a hedge

For trading desks, the successor book is a sentiment gauge, not an instrument. It carries about $288,000 of liquidity against a company worth roughly $3.9 trillion. It amounts to 2% 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 real risk transfer happened elsewhere. Nvidia shares opened at $151.01, touched a 52-week low of $148.80 and traded near $160 at 10:11 a.m., down almost 8%, according to CNBC data. The NVDA perpetual contract on Hyperliquid turned over about $2 billion in 24 hours, the venue's own data showed.

What happens next

The next catalyst is Tuesday, 17 November, when Nvidia reports fiscal third-quarter results with Kress serving 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. The levels are best read as a live poll of informed opinion rather than a forecast with capital behind it.