NVIDIA CEO Search: Rene Haas Reportedly Approached to Succeed Huang

The FT said Haas is one of several candidates and that there is no guarantee he will be offered the job or accept it. Reuters said it could not verify the report. Arm declined to comment, and NVIDIA did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. Reuters said Arm's US-listed shares pared losses after the report but were still down more than 5%, while NVIDIA's shares were down more than 3%.

This is the first outside candidate reported by name since Huang resigned on Nov. 12. NVIDIA's own release that day named CFO Colette Kress interim CEO and said the board had begun a search that would consider internal and external candidates. It named no one, and nothing in it confirms the FT account. Arm and SoftBank have issued no statement that we could find.

Why an Arm chief matters to NVIDIA

NVIDIA's data-center roadmap leans on Arm-designed cores. The GB300 Grace Blackwell Ultra superchip, for example, pairs one Grace CPU with 72 Arm Neoverse V2 cores with a Blackwell Ultra GPU, according to the GB300 specifications ASUS lists for its desktop system. A CEO who runs the company that licenses those cores would arrive with close knowledge of NVIDIA's CPU supply chain, and with a conflict-of-interest question to resolve before any move.

Haas knows both sides. Reuters said he spent about seven years at NVIDIA, rising to vice president and general manager of its computing products business, before joining Arm in 2013. He has been Arm's CEO since 2022 and oversaw its 2023 Nasdaq listing.

The 2020 deal that failed

NVIDIA agreed on Sept. 13, 2020 to buy Arm from SoftBank Group, and the two companies ended the agreement on Feb. 7, 2022 because of significant regulatory challenges, according to NVIDIA's termination announcement. SoftBank kept the $1.25 billion NVIDIA had prepaid. Any NVIDIA approach to Arm's chief would therefore touch a company NVIDIA once tried to own, which is why a formal Arm or SoftBank response matters.

What is not confirmed yet

Neither company has confirmed an approach. The FT's sourcing is unnamed, and Reuters has not verified it. It is unknown whether Haas was interviewed, whether he is interested, or who else is on the list. NVIDIA has said it expects operations, customer commitments and the product roadmap to continue without interruption under Kress. It is set to report third-quarter fiscal 2027 results on Nov. 17, as Voltgrid reported, and investors will listen for any word on the search.