Who can decide Jensen Huang's fate? Nvidia's board is stacked with veterans, yet finding a successor is difficult.

Beating AI News Flash: The Information conducted an in-depth investigation into Nvidia's board members and found a thorny issue: Jensen Huang's future now depends on the board, but the world's most valuable company has no clear CEO successor, and several board members are longtime associates who have worked with Huang for decades.

Nvidia has 11 directors, including Huang himself. Of the other 10, five have served for more than a decade. Venture capitalists Tench Coxe and Mark Stevens joined the board when Nvidia was founded in 1993. They came from Sutter Hill Ventures and Sequoia Capital, respectively, which were early investors in Nvidia.

The most likely person to lead the investigation is lead independent director Stephen Neal. This veteran lawyer, nearly 80 years old, joined Nvidia's board in 2019 and also serves as chairman of the corporate governance committee. His firm, Cooley LLP, has provided legal services to Nvidia since 1993.

Neal's resume is quite unusual. He provided legal defense for Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and also represented Charles Keating, a central figure in the U.S. savings and loan crisis financial fraud cases of the 1980s. When FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried's company was on the brink of bankruptcy, he also proposed Neal as chairman.

Neal also oversees Meta's independent content review body. A member familiar with him described him as pragmatic and inclined to solve problems with minimal disruption.

However, Nvidia has not disclosed the specific members of the investigation committee, so it is unclear whether Neal is personally leading it.

Other board members include Suzanne Nora Johnson, former vice chairman of Goldman Sachs, who joined in July this year, and Caltech professor John Dabiri. One of the latter's research areas is the swimming mechanisms of marine organisms such as jellyfish and shrimp.

The board needs to investigate whether Huang's personal relationships have led to the leakage of company secrets and whether he violated internal rules. If the investigation finds problems, it will also have to decide how to deal with the founder and CEO.

The real trouble is succession. Huang has long directly managed dozens of executives, with core business leaders reporting to him separately, and there is no recognized No. 2 figure. Among Nvidia's board members, there is also no one who has served as CEO of a large company.

Jesse Fried, a corporate governance expert at Harvard University, anticipates that the investigation could last for months, and the board is likely to ultimately choose to retain Jensen Huang, as he is too important to Nvidia.

One possible outcome is that the board determines Huang violated company rules and acted recklessly, but addresses it by strengthening internal controls, at most imposing symbolic penalties such as a pay cut.