Nvidia Board Approached Arm Chief Rene Haas About Succeeding Jensen Huang

According to the FT, Haas is one of several candidates the board is weighing, and there is no guarantee he will be offered the job or would accept it. Arm declined to comment. Nvidia did not immediately respond to requests for comment, and neither company has confirmed that any talks took place.

The report is the first public sign of where the board is looking as Nvidia prepares to report quarterly results on Tuesday under an interim chief executive. Huang, who co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and ran it for 33 years, stepped down on Thursday after revelations of extramarital affairs. One of them was with Alice Huang, an executive at the Singapore-based Nvidia customer Megaspeed whom US intelligence officials suspect of being a Chinese agent. The two are not related. Colette Kress, Nvidia's finance chief, is serving as interim CEO.

Haas would not be an outsider. He spent seven years at Nvidia, rising to vice president and general manager of its computing products business, before joining Arm in 2013. He became Arm's chief executive in 2022 and led the SoftBank-owned company's Nasdaq listing in 2023. Investing.com reported that he has kept close relationships with Huang and with several Nvidia directors.

Hiring him would also take the chief executive away from a company whose technology sits inside part of Nvidia's own product line. Arm designs processor architectures and licenses them to companies that build chips. Its business grew up in mobile phones and has been expanding into computers. Nvidia's Grace and Vera CPU platforms are built on Arm's architecture, and Investing.com said the report raised questions about leadership continuity at Arm.

Arm's US-listed shares were down more than 5% on Friday afternoon, and Nvidia's were down more than 3%, according to Reuters. The moves came as chip stocks fell across the board, with the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index down around 5%. HSBC cut Nvidia to hold from buy on Friday and lowered its price target to $170 from $365. According to Yahoo Finance, analyst Frank Lee wrote that investor confidence had been "shaken" because the company's "leadership succession plan is unclear".

The board's search is happening alongside a political fight in Washington over how Nvidia chips reached China. Brian Mast, the Republican chairman of the House foreign affairs committee, has said Huang will testify before Congress this month. Lawmakers from both parties are questioning how the Commerce Department oversaw exports to Megaspeed, the company at the centre of the scandal.

Nvidia has not given a timetable for naming a permanent chief executive. Its third-quarter results are due on Tuesday.