Nvidia Approaches Arm Chief Rene Haas in Search for Huang Successor

Nvidia’s board has approached Arm chief executive Rene Haas as a potential successor to Jensen Huang, the Financial Times reported on Friday, as the chipmaker scrambles to fill its top job a day after its founder’s abrupt departure.

Haas is among several candidates being considered, and there is no guarantee he will be offered the role or accept it, the Financial Times reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Nvidia’s finance chief, Colette Kress, is serving as interim chief executive while the search continues.

A search that began in crisis

Huang stepped down on Thursday as president, chief executive and director, effective immediately, after revelations of extramarital affairs, including one involving a suspected Chinese spy. The exit plunged the world’s most valuable chipmaker into crisis and sent shockwaves across the artificial intelligence industry he helped bankroll.

Huang has also agreed to testify before Congress about his relationship with Alice Huang, the businesswoman at the centre of the national security concerns, according to Reuters.

Nvidia’s board said it was in the process of selecting a search firm for the chief executive role and had not formally engaged any potential candidates. “Any speculation regarding individual candidates, whether internal or external, is premature,” the board said in a statement.

Haas’s name has been making the rounds among analysts since Huang’s exit. He became Arm’s chief executive in 2022 and oversaw the British chip designer’s listing on the Nasdaq in 2023.

Employees push for Huang’s return

Even as the board looks outside the company, some Nvidia employees are pushing for Huang to come back. Technology news platform Wired reported on Thursday that an internal post by a longtime Nvidia engineer, urging the board to consider employee sentiment over Huang’s future, had drawn more than 1,600 comments, with several calling for his reinstatement.

Billionaire Elon Musk separately said on X that a petition was under way to reinstate Huang and that he would sign it.

Nvidia declined to comment on the Wired report and Musk’s post, while Arm also declined to comment. Reuters reported that it could not independently verify the reports.

Why Haas fits the brief

Haas runs the company whose chip designs sit at the heart of almost every smartphone on the planet, and whose architecture is increasingly central to the data centres that power artificial intelligence. That makes him one of the few outsiders with both the technical credibility and the industry standing to lead Nvidia.

The two companies also have history. Nvidia agreed to buy Arm in 2020 in a deal worth $40 billion, but abandoned the purchase in 2022 after regulators in the United States, Britain and Europe raised competition concerns. A Haas appointment would reunite the two firms at the top, without a takeover.

Shares under pressure

Investors have punished Nvidia since the scandal broke. The shares opened down 14 percent on Thursday before recovering some ground to close down 4.3 percent. The stock was on track for a sixth straight weekly decline, its longest losing streak since October 2012, according to Reuters, and has shed roughly $1.3 trillion in market value since the first reports emerged in late October.

Chip stocks sank again on Friday as the sell-off spread across the sector, even as demand for the hardware behind AI spending remains strong. Anthropic’s IPO drew orders worth six times the shares on offer this week, a sign that investor appetite for artificial intelligence has not disappeared, even as its biggest hardware supplier reels.

The leadership crisis also lands amid intense scrutiny of Nvidia’s business in China. The Trump administration has been weighing tougher curbs on chip diversion to China, and lawmakers have demanded the company preserve records linked to a probe of advanced chip shipments.

What happens next

The board has not set a public timetable for the appointment. Its first step is to hire a search firm, and it has cautioned against reading too much into any single name.

For investors, the choice matters. An insider would signal continuity at a company whose products underpin the global AI boom, while an outsider such as Haas would mark a sharp break — and a test of whether Nvidia can keep its momentum without the founder who built it.

Huang’s congressional testimony, the board’s search and the share price will now be watched together. The company that defined the AI era has to prove it can survive without the man who defined it.