Arm CEO Rene Haas on AI: Nvidia Lessons, Intel's Decline and the US-China Chip War
episodePreviously titled “Arm CEO Rene Haas on AI: Nvidia Lessons, Intel’s Decline and the US-China Chip War” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 6, 2026
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Who is Arm CEO Rene Haas and what is his background?
There's a company nearly every chip maker relies on that doesn't actually make anything tangible.
What lessons did Rene Haas learn from working with Jensen Huang at Nvidia?
Yet its blockbuster IPO in September valued it above $54 billion. It's the largest public offering in over two years.
How does Arm's history relate to Nvidia's dominance in AI?
The valuation of the company has tripled. If you have a smartphone in your pocket or in front of you, you have an ARM circuit somewhere inside of it.
We are the CPU, the heart of everything. They're the winner of the CPU side. The foundation models, the software, it's moving far faster than the hardware. So what we're seeing is people investing faster and faster into new hardware, which ends up being a good thing for us.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Arm's CEO, Rene Haas.
What challenges does China face in developing its AI ecosystem?
Rene, what are you banging these days? Three milligrams of Alpouches or you're up to nine? I know you're competing with NVIDIA, so you probably want to go with the nine, right?
I will go with the nine. With Jensen, you have to go big.
How can the US create a culture of excellence in manufacturing?
You have to go big with Jensen. What's that like to compete against NVIDIA?
Well, I will say NVIDIA is a customer of ours, so I'm not going to say Jensen is my competitor today.
What impact do US export controls have on the tech industry?
But, you know, I worked for NVIDIA for many, many years, as you know, and he's fantastic, right? And learned so much working there, working for him, working with him. And then NVIDIA, you know, almost acquired ARM in 2020. So I almost, you know, had a chance to work with him again.
What did you learn from Jensen?
What is the significance of the US-China AI arms race?
One of the things about Jensen that is amazing, I think it's also true for people like Michael Dell, Masa. You have these entrepreneurs who started their companies 30 years ago, 40 years ago, and they're still running it. You have this amazing set of characteristics of vision, speed, fearlessness, taking risk, and an ability to pivot. uh very very fast and i saw that a lot at nvidia you know when i was there we were only about four billion dollars in sales and uh and at that time we were looking at lots of different ways to grow business models and such and i just remember being you know one story we were at a strategic off site and it was supposed to be a review of road maps where we were looking at each one of the general managers going through what the uh
projected in their business. And what was intended to be a roadmap review turned into, we're changing the strategy. We're abolishing this product line. We're going to move 2,000 engineers off of project X onto project Y. And by the way, we were only about 6,000 people at the time.
What was Project X? What was Project Y?
So we were involved at that time in trying to do mobile chipsets connecting to an Intel processor, right? And back in the day, for those who remember PC architecture, doing these chipsets competing with Intel was really hard business. And Intel was making it very, very hard to compete relative to the integration that they did. And in fact, that was the genesis of starting to pivot to Arm in a very big way inside Nvidia. Because at that time, Jensen looked at what was going on with SOCs and Arm-based architecture and moved everybody on to the SOC program.
So let's maybe take a step back and level set for the audience. So just to give some background, Masayoshi-san and SoftBank took Arm private. Took it private, yeah, for $32 billion. $32 billion. And then tried to sell it famously.
Yes.
Couldn't find a bidder.
Could not find a bidder.
Hung on to it. Took it public. It's now $150 billion market cap company.
That's right.
And you were telling us backstage, he famously, you know, refuses to sell a share. That's right. So it's like a slow kind of process of just building the shareholder base, but you've done phenomenally well as a business. Just set the landscape for people that want to understand NVIDIA, the most valuable company in the world. But it's a window to understanding AI. What do they make that's so powerful? And why aren't there other competitive solutions at that level of scale yet? And how do you think that changes over the next five, 10 years?
Oh boy, a lot there to describe. So the way to think about NVIDIA, and to some extent, even though I'm the CEO of Arm, I don't want to tie it necessarily back to Arm, but in our world, what really drives demand is compute workloads.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Who is Arm CEO Rene Haas and what is his background?
0:02–0:07
2
What lessons did Rene Haas learn from working with Jensen Huang at Nvidia?
0:07–0:13
3
How does Arm's history relate to Nvidia's dominance in AI?
0:13–0:50
4
What challenges does China face in developing its AI ecosystem?
0:50–1:07
5
How can the US create a culture of excellence in manufacturing?
1:07–1:19
6
What impact do US export controls have on the tech industry?
1:19–1:39
7
What is the significance of the US-China AI arms race?
1:39–4:31
8
How can the US regain its competitive edge in semiconductor manufacturing?
4:31–25:02
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