The Nvidia board is reportedly taking a phone call to Arm Holdings CEO Rene Haas in their efforts to recruit a replacement for Jensen Huang. The development follows the resignation of Nvidia’s CEO Huang on Thursday and has raised suspicions about the company’s leadership as well as concerns around the worldwide AI industry.
Haas has become one of the few names being floated around for the job. Prior to joining British chip designer Arm in 2013, he spent seven years at Nvidia working his way up to vice president and general manager of the company’s computing products business.
But Haas is one of a handful of contenders for the spot reported, and it is not clear if he’d accept or be formally offered it. There are interim interim CEO Colette Kress of Nvidia in charge of finance and Mark Zuckerberg in charge of marketing.
Nvidia’s board was still working on finding a search firm to hire as CEO and hadn’t signed up any candidates, it added. The board also said that rumors about specific candidates were “too early and too soon.
In the interim, it was reported that some Nvidia employees advocated that Huang come back. More than 1,600 comments were reportedly poured into an internal email asking the board to consider employee sentiment, including a few who called for attempts to “restore” the former CEO.
In a separate post on X, billionaire Elon Musk announced that a petition was in the works to have Huang back and would sign it. Musk didn’t specify at the moment if it is the same unnamed internal effort that he was talking about.