Rene Haas as Nvidia CEO? What it would mean for Arm and SoftBank

Very little is confirmed beyond the vacancy itself. Huang resigned on Thursday, ending 33 years running the company he co-founded in 1993, after reports about his personal relationships. One of those drew attention from US officials over suspected links to Chinese intelligence, and Nvidia said it had no reason to believe its secrets were exposed.

For now the company is in the hands of an interim chief, its finance boss Colette Kress, while Harvey Jones, who has sat on the board for years, has stepped up as chair. On the hunt for a permanent leader, Nvidia’s board said it is still picking an It called any guessing about specific people, from inside or outside the company, premature.al candidates, whether internal or external, is premature.”

The Haas report comes from people familiar with the matter who spoke to the FT. It describes him as one of several names under consideration, with close ties to Huang and to some Nvidia directors. Treat it as a credible report, not a done deal.

• Confirmed: Huang is out, Kress is interim CEO, and the board is setting up a formal search.
• Reported, not confirmed: the board has approached Haas.
• Not happening yet: no offer, no acceptance, and no comment from Arm.

Haas is a 64-year-old chip executive based in Silicon Valley. He grew up near Rochester, New York, studied electrical engineering at Clarkson University and worked sales and engineering jobs at Tensilica and Scintera Networks before joining Nvidia in 2006.

At Nvidia he rose to vice president and general manager of its computing products business, one of the company’s bigger revenue lines at the time. That’s the key to his candidacy. He has seen Huang’s famously fast, hands-on culture from the inside, which matters at a company where the boss personally steers engineering plans.

His Arm career is the second half of the pitch. He joined in 2013, became chief commercial officer in 2015, took over the intellectual-property products group in 2017 and became CEO in February 2022. The timing was dramatic: he took charge just as Nvidia’s own $40 billion bid to buy Arm fell apart under regulators’ pressure. In other words, Haas ended up running the very company his old employer couldn’t acquire.

He then took Arm back onto the Nasdaq in September 2023 at a starting valuation of about $54.5 billion, one of that year’s biggest listings. Since then Arm has pushed past licensing into building more of the chip itself and into data centers. In the quarter that ended September 30, Arm brought in $1.44 billion, up 27% on the year, and its data-center royalties doubled.

Arm investors read the report as a risk, not a compliment. Shares slid 6.5% on Friday, on a day when the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index lost about 5% and chip names such as AMD and Broadcom also fell.

The worry is simple. Haas is the face of Arm’s strategy shift, and losing him mid-push would leave a question mark over the company’s plans. It also gets messy because the two firms are tangled together. Nvidia’s own Grace and Vera processors are built on Arm’s architecture, and Arm is moving into data-center hardware where Nvidia dominates.

Money is part of the picture too. In 2026, Arm’s pay committee proposed share options worth up to $100 million if Arm becomes a trillion-dollar company by 2029, rising to $800 million if it hits two trillion by 2031. Haas would collect them only if Arm reaches those values.

Haas doesn’t only work for Arm. He sits on SoftBank’s board, and since April he has also been CEO of SoftBank Group International, helping run the Japanese group’s chip and AI holdings. SoftBank is Arm’s majority owner and kept control even after the 2023 listing.

That means a move to Nvidia would be more than a resignation letter. He would need to unwind board seats and an operating role at a group whose interests increasingly overlap with Nvidia’s in AI hardware. Arm declined to comment on the report.

Arm licenses its chip designs to companies including Apple, Amazon and Qualcomm, and those designs sit inside most smartphones and a growing share of cloud servers. So a leadership change at either company reaches well beyond Wall Street.

Here is where the effects show up:

• Your retirement account: Nvidia lost $573 billion in market value in a single week, which shows how quickly CEO risk can hit a share price.
• AI tools you use: Nvidia’s chips underpin much of the global AI boom, and its next boss will sign off on the product roadmap behind them.
• Arm’s plans: losing its CEO mid-push into data centers would raise new questions about Arm’s own strategy, which shapes the chip designs other companies license.

Probably months, not weeks. Naveen Rao, founder of Unconventional AI, argued at a Yahoo Finance conference that the job should be filled within roughly three or four months, because Nvidia is known for changing its product plans quickly and someone has to make those calls.

Haas isn’t the only name being floated. Inside Nvidia, Kress and Ian Buck, a veteran engineer linked to the company’s CUDA software, are mentioned. Outside it, industry watchers point to AMD’s Lisa Su, Micron’s Sanjay Mehrotra, Marvell’s Matt Murphy and Apple hardware chief Johny Srouji. President Donald Trump has even floated former Apple boss Tim Cook. None of these are confirmed candidates.

Meanwhile some Nvidia staff want Huang back. An internal suggestion-box post drew more than 1,600 comments, many backing his return, and Elon Musk said on X he would sign a petition to reinstate him. That pressure doesn’t mean the board is considering it.