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- Arm CEO says working with Nvidia’s Jensen Huang taught him a key leadership lesson.
- Rene Haas recalled how Huang once scrapped a product line and reassigned 2,000 engineers overnight.
- “You have this amazing set of characteristics of vision, speed, fearlessness,” Haas said of Huang.
Arm CEO Rene Haas said at Nvidia, he saw up close how bold leadership decisions can change a company’s trajectory.
The CEO of the $150 billion chip design firm spoke about his seven years at Nvidia working on computing products at the All-In Summit 2025 in September, in a conversation posted Wednesday.
Haas said he saw how Jensen Huang built the company by taking bold risks and pivoting quickly.
Haas said Huang changed strategy at an off-site meeting meant to review business roadmaps. “We’re abolishing this product line. We’re going to move 2,000 engineers off of project X onto project Y,” said Haas, adding that the company had only about 6,000 people at the time.
That abrupt shift — away from making support chips for Intel’s processors — proved decisive. Instead of trying to keep up with Intel in PCs, Huang redirected thousands of engineers to focus on Arm-based designs and graphics chips. That move reshaped the company’s future, said Haas, who left Nvidia in 2013 to join Arm.
“You have this amazing set of characteristics of vision, speed, fearlessness, taking risk, and an ability to pivot very, very fast,” Haas said of Huang, adding that he has “learned so much” from working with him.
Nvidia is one of Arm’s flagship customers — its latest AI chips combine Arm-based CPUs with its own powerful GPUs.
In 2020, Nvidia tried to acquire Arm in a $40 billion deal that fell through because of regulatory hurdles. Haas told Business Insider in 2022 that Arm wasn’t dwelling on the failed sale and was instead focused on expanding in industries like cloud, networking, automotive, and the Internet of Things.
“I’m not going to say Jensen is my competitor today,” Haas said at the All-In Summit.
But when asked if Arm might eventually make its own chips and go head-to-head with Nvidia, he added: “I’m not going to say that today, but could we do that? I hinted in the last conference call that we’re looking at going a little bit further than we do today.”
Haas, Arm, and Nvidia did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
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