Nvidia's board has reportedly approached Arm CEO Rene Haas about succeeding Jensen Huang, according to people familiar with the matter cited in a newspaper report.
Haas is one of several candidates. It is unclear whether he will get a formal offer or accept one. Huang has left the CEO role, and CFO Colette Kress is serving as interim chief executive while the board weighs internal and external options. Neither Arm nor Nvidia commented.
Haas knows the building. He spent about seven years at Nvidia before leaving in 2013, working as a vice president on notebook GPUs, Windows-on-Arm and Tegra, Nvidia's line of system-on-chips. He reportedly keeps close ties with Huang and several board members.
Since taking over Arm in 2022, he has also shown a taste for changing the business. Arm now offers Compute Subsystems, pre-validated processor designs that lower the barrier for newcomers, and it has launched its first own-brand CPU. That puts Arm in competition with some of its own licensees. Nvidia is one of them, alongside Apple, Qualcomm and MediaTek. Haas also led Arm's 2023 IPO, so he has dealt with public investors and regulators.
The obvious gap is scale. Arm has about 10,000 employees and licenses chip designs. Nvidia has about 42,000 and sells CPUs, GPUs, networking gear, complete AI systems and software, with a supply chain to match. Huang has led the company since he founded it in 1993 and shaped its strategy personally, so any successor inherits an unusually personal job.
The pairing would also carry some history. Nvidia tried to buy Arm in 2020 and abandoned the deal in 2022 amid regulatory opposition. If Haas got the job, the company that regulators kept from owning Arm would be run by Arm's CEO.