Nvidia's board approached Arm CEO Rene Haas about the top job, the FT reports, as the stock posts a sixth straight weekly loss
Nvidia fell 2% Friday, its longest weekly losing streak since 2012. Arm slid 4.6%, AMD 8.8% and the chip index 3.4%, while Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent asked whether Nvidia knew who it was selling to.
Photo: Jakub Pabis / Pexels
One day after Jensen Huang resigned, the search for the next leader of the world's most important chip company already has a name attached to it. Nvidia's board has approached Rene Haas, the chief executive of British chip designer Arm Holdings, as a potential successor, the Financial Times reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The FT said Haas is among several candidates and that there is no guarantee he will be offered the job or accept it. Arm declined to comment, and Nvidia did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. Reuters said it could not independently verify the report.
Who Rene Haas is
Haas is not an outsider to Nvidia. He spent seven years there, rising to vice president and general manager of its computing products business, before joining Arm in 2013, Reuters reported. He became Arm's CEO in 2022 and oversaw the company's return to the Nasdaq in 2023. Fox Business said the FT described him as having a "strong relationship" with Huang and some of Nvidia's directors.
Arm designs processor architectures and licenses them to companies that build their own chips. Its historical strength is in smartphones, and it has been expanding into computers and data centers.
Investors did not treat the report as good news for Arm. The shares closed down 4.63% at $190.53, according to Yahoo Finance data and a Fox Business quote table. Investing.com said the decline had reached 6.5% during the session and accelerated after the FT story crossed.
Nvidia's longest losing run since 2012
Nvidia itself fell 2.01% to $162.85, according to Investing.com and Yahoo Finance data, after briefly trading higher before the open. Reuters said the stock has now declined for six straight weeks, its longest streak since October 2012. MacDailyNews put the company's market value at about $3.93 trillion after the close.
Colette Kress, the finance chief who became interim CEO on Thursday, faces her first big public test quickly. Nvidia still plans to report third-quarter results after the close on Tuesday, Nov. 17, with the call at 2 p.m. Pacific time, according to Yahoo Finance.
"The AI Revolution has never been about one person," Cullen Rogers, chief investment officer at Wedbush Fund Advisers, told Kiplinger. The company now has to prove that "it can execute without its founder, and the November 17 call is the first read on that."
Washington widens the story
The bigger shift on Friday came from the Treasury. Speaking on CNBC's "Squawk Box," Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said several agencies had wanted restrictions on Megaspeed, the company at the center of the scandal around Huang's departure, for months, but that the Commerce Department controls that decision.
"The story has been thus far on Jensen Huang's personal foibles. The real story here should be: Did NVIDIA know their client." - Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, on CNBC
Bessent said Treasury, the Pentagon, the State Department and the U.S. Trade Representative "were in favor of putting Megaspeed on the entity list for months." He added that he was frustrated because President Donald Trump had "made it very clear that China should not receive any NVIDIA chips above H100s." A Commerce Department spokeswoman had earlier told CNBC that a reported Situation Room exchange between Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick never happened.
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The rest of the chip trade gave back its gains
The pressure spread across the sector. The Philadelphia Semiconductor index fell 3.43% to 10,146.32, according to Yahoo Finance data. Advanced Micro Devices dropped 8.75% to $534.06, giving back part of a rally of nearly 45% over the previous five sessions, Benzinga reported.
Dell Technologies lost 7.18% to $344.53. Investing.com said the drop followed a Bloomberg report that 22 Dell-built servers containing restricted Nvidia H800 chips, originally sold to Singapore-based Aperia Cloud Services, ended up in a Shanghai data center tied to the scandal. Dell said it had halted all sales and support to Aperia in February 2025 over concerns about unauthorized diversion of equipment, according to Investing.com.
"The market and investors are trying to navigate what does the AI theme look like when we have the absence of Jensen Huang, who was basically the AI champion and willing to use Nvidia's balance sheet to fund a lot of this AI expansion," Anthony Saglimbene, chief market strategist at Ameriprise Financial, told Reuters.
A losing day inside a winning week
The broader market held up better than the chip stocks. The S&P 500 fell 30.73 points, or 0.40%, to 7,561.67, and the Nasdaq Composite lost 229.82 points, or 0.91%, to 25,136.27. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 50.46 points, or 0.10%, to 52,347.55, according to Reuters figures that matched Yahoo Finance data.
For the week, the S&P 500 gained 2.51%, the Nasdaq 2.27% and the Dow 2.07%, Reuters said, with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq both snapping four-week losing streaks.
What carries into next week
Tuesday's earnings report is the main event, and it will be judged on more than the numbers: investors will listen for anything on leadership, the CEO search and export controls. Kress has also called a company-wide meeting for Wednesday, Nov. 18. Kiplinger flagged a highly anticipated Anthropic IPO on next week's calendar as well, another test of appetite for AI stocks after a volatile stretch.
