Nvidia's board has approached Arm chief executive Rene Haas about succeeding Jensen Huang, people familiar with the matter told the Financial Times on Friday - and prediction-market bettors wasted no time crowning him the favorite.
Polymarket's "Next CEO of NVIDIA?" market priced Haas at a 33% chance shortly after the report, putting him atop a field of two dozen names.
By Friday afternoon the odds had cooled to about 25.1% for Haas on the market, which had drawn nearly $1.5 million in bets. Haas held only a sliver of a lead over Ian Buck, the head of Nvidia's data center business, at 25%, followed by Apple chip boss Johny Srouji at about 8%, "no change" (Huang staying put) at about 7% and interim CEO Colette Kress at 7%. AMD's Lisa Su, named by the FT as the other plausible outsider, traded at about 2%.
Haas is one of several candidates, according to the FT, and there is no guarantee he will be offered the job or take it. Internal options include Kress and Buck. Nvidia, meanwhile, said in a statement that they have not formally engaged any potential candidates, and that any speculation is 'premature.'
Huang resigned on Thursday after 33 years in charge. In its 8-K, Nvidia said Kress, its CFO, will serve as interim chief executive while keeping the finance job, that director Harvey Jones, on the board since the company's 1993 founding, becomes its first-ever chair, and that the board "will consider internal and external candidates" for the permanent role.
Huang's exit followed revelations of affairs with at least one subordinate and with a client Alice Huang, whom US intelligence suspects of being a Chinese spy. The board is also overseeing an independent probe into Huang's conduct led by a former federal prosecutor, the FT reported, after it launched its review last week.
Haas spent about seven years at Nvidia, where Huang mentored him, before leaving for Arm in 2013, and he has run the SoftBank-controlled chip designer since 2022. He still has a strong relationship with Huang and some of Nvidia's directors, per the FT.
Nvidia once tried to buy Haas's company outright: its $40 billion bid for Arm, struck with SoftBank in 2020, was terminated in February 2022 over "significant regulatory challenges," costing Nvidia a $1.36 billion write-off of its prepayment.
In March, Arm launched its own data center chip, the AGI CPU, with Meta among its first customers - putting the company in competition with the same chipmakers, Nvidia included, that license its designs. And in April SoftBank made Haas chief executive of SoftBank Group International as well, coordinating its semiconductor and AI holdings as Masayoshi Son pours money into chips meant to compete with Nvidia's.
Arm shares slid on Friday after the report. Whoever ends up with the job, it is Kress who will face Wall Street on Nov. 17, when Nvidia reports third-quarter results, the company said.