Nvidia Approaches Arm CEO Rene Haas as Potential Successor to Jensen Huang, FT Reports

NVDA's board has approached ARM chief executive Rene Haas as a potential successor to Jensen Huang, the Financial Times reported on Friday, November 13, citing people familiar with the matter. The report says Haas is one of several candidates under consideration, with no guarantee that he will be offered the job or accept it. Reuters, which relayed the FT story, said it could not independently verify it, and that the board had not yet formally engaged candidates and was still selecting a search firm (Reuters via Spokesman-Review).

Haas is a familiar name inside Nvidia. He spent seven years there, rising to vice president and general manager of its computing products business, before joining Arm in 2013 (Reuters via Spokesman-Review), and he has run the SoftBank-backed chip designer since 2022. He has kept close ties with Huang and with members of Nvidia's board, according to the report. Author Tae Kim, who wrote a book on Nvidia's rise, argued separately that the search should focus on Haas and on in-house executive Ian Buck, the vice president of hyperscale and high-performance computing who created the CUDA software platform.

The company has not endorsed any name. Nvidia's board said that "any speculation regarding individual candidates, whether internal or external, is premature," and Arm declined to comment (Reuters via Spokesman-Review). Reuters listed other names in circulation, including interim CEO Colette Kress and Buck internally, and AMD's Lisa Su, MU's Sanjay Mehrotra, MRVL's Matt Murphy and AAPL's Johny Srouji externally (Reuters via Spokesman-Review). Huang resigned on November 12, and Kress is serving as interim CEO while keeping her CFO role until a permanent successor is named.

For investors, the report is the first concrete sign of where the search may be heading, not a decision. The things to watch are whether the board hires a search firm and sets a timeline, any comment from Arm, and how Nvidia frames the transition at its upcoming earnings report, the first since Huang's exit.