Two days after Jensen Huang's shock exit, Nvidia's board has reportedly sounded out one of its own alumni, Arm chief Rene Haas, while thousands of employees and Elon Musk are rallying to bring the founder back.
Nvidia's board has approached Arm Holdings CEO Rene Haas in its search for a successor to Jensen Huang, the Financial Times reported on Friday, November 13, citing people familiar with the matter. The report, according to Reuters, says Haas is one of several candidates under consideration, with no guarantee he will be offered the job or accept it. Nvidia's board has pushed back on the idea that any choice is close: in a statement, it said it was still "in the process of selecting a search firm" and had not formally engaged any candidates. Chief financial officer Colette Kress continues to serve as interim CEO.
What the board has said, and what it hasn't
The FT story is the first concrete sign of who Nvidia might be looking at, but the company is taking care not to confirm it. "Any speculation regarding individual candidates, whether internal or external, is premature," the board said, as reported by Reuters via Business Standard. Arm declined to comment, and Reuters said it could not independently verify the FT's report.
That leaves the most valuable chipmaker of the AI era without a permanent leader, and without a formal search process, just days before its next earnings report. Nvidia is due to post quarterly results on Tuesday after the US market close.
Why Rene Haas fits the profile
Haas is a familiar face in Santa Clara. He spent seven years at Nvidia, rising to vice president and general manager of its computing products business, before moving to Arm in 2013. He became Arm's CEO in 2022 and took the SoftBank-backed British chip designer public on Nasdaq in 2023. Arm designs processor architectures and licenses them to other chipmakers. Its business was built on mobile phones, and it is now pushing into computers. According to The Economic Times, which carried an ANI report based on the FT story, Haas is understood to have strong professional ties with Huang and several Nvidia board members.
Some analysts see that mix as rare. "Rene is one of few external candidates who wouldn't need to be brought up to speed on Nvidia," Shay Boloor, chief market strategist at Futurum Equities, told Reuters. He added that Haas's grasp of Nvidia's culture, combined with his experience running Arm, was "a combination you don't find very often."
Investors were less enthusiastic about what the move could mean for Arm. Arm's US-listed shares closed down about 5% on Friday, while Nvidia ended roughly 2% lower. Reuters said that took Nvidia's market value losses for the week to about $573 billion.
The wider field of contenders
Haas isn't the only name in circulation. Inside the company, analysts see Kress as a steady financial hand and veteran engineer Ian Buck, who led development of the CUDA software platform behind Nvidia's AI chips, as a top candidate. Outside names mentioned by analysts include AMD chief Lisa Su, Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra, Marvell head Matt Murphy and Apple hardware chief Johny Srouji. US President Donald Trump has floated former Apple CEO Tim Cook.
According to Reuters, the board's real choice is between priorities: financial continuity, deep technical expertise, or experience running a global tech giant. Some analysts expect the next CEO to move away from Huang's hands-on style. For three decades he acted as the company's "chief conductor", personally steering engineering roadmaps, export negotiations over China and big investments across the AI ecosystem.
A grassroots push to reinstate Huang
Inside Nvidia, part of the workforce wants a different outcome. Wired reported late on Thursday that a longtime engineer had urged the board, in an internal post written before Huang resigned, to consider employee sentiment before acting. Citing internal correspondence, Wired said the post has drawn more than 1,600 comments, with several urging the board to find a way to bring Huang back. Nvidia has about 42,000 employees worldwide.
Elon Musk then weighed in. Replying to a user on X, he wrote: "A petition is underway to reinstate Jensen and I'm signing it too," according to The Economic Times. Reuters noted it was not clear whether Musk meant the internal effort Wired described. Nvidia declined to comment on both the Wired report and Musk's post.
Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and announced his resignation on Thursday after 33 years in charge. He stepped down after revelations of extramarital affairs, including a relationship with a businesswoman whom US officials suspect of spying for China. Nothing reported so far indicates the board is reconsidering his departure.
Markets are feeling the aftershocks
The leadership vacuum is weighing on the whole AI trade. On Friday, Nvidia-backed "neocloud" providers CoreWeave and Nebius each fell around 9% in afternoon trading, and AMD dropped more than 10%, Reuters reported. Part of the concern is financing. Under Huang, Nvidia helped fund infrastructure built around its own chips, a strategy that drove demand but raised questions about money circulating between the chipmaker and its customers. "It's a short-term death blow to the industry because the amount of vendor financing and financing guarantees that Nvidia and Jensen Huang stepped into are now over," said Thomas Hayes, chairman of Great Hill Capital.
By the close, the Philadelphia semiconductor index was down 3.4% and the Nasdaq Composite had fallen 0.91%, according to Reuters' market wrap. "You have no idea what to expect from Nvidia. That's the problem. This company is pure uncertainty right now," said Steve Sosnick, chief market analyst at Interactive Brokers.
What to watch next
The next big test is Tuesday's earnings. The numbers will matter, but investors will be listening just as closely for anything on the succession timeline, the choice of search firm and how Kress plans to run the company in the meantime. Anthropic's long-awaited stock market debut, also expected next week, will be another read on whether AI enthusiasm can survive the Nvidia shake-up.
Analysis: Haas would bring rare continuity as an outsider who knows Nvidia from the inside. But the board's insistence that talks are "premature," the open employee revolt and Arm's own share slide all suggest this search will be messier than a single FT scoop implies. Until Nvidia names a permanent leader, the uncertainty Sosnick describes is likely to keep hanging over the chip sector.