When Arm started its podcast, Rene Haas could have booked anyone for the first episode. He drove to Nvidia’s headquarters in Santa Clara, sat down with Jensen Huang and introduced him as “my former boss and a personal mentor of mine.”

Now the board Huang left behind wants to talk to Haas about his old boss’s job.

Nvidia’s board has approached Haas as it looks for a permanent replacement for Huang, according to the Financial Times, which cited people familiar with the matter. Huang resigned Thursday. The FT says Haas is one of several candidates, and that there’s no guarantee he’ll be offered the job or take it if he is. Arm declined to comment. Nvidia didn’t immediately respond to Reuters, which said it couldn’t verify the report.

Technically an outsider

When Nvidia announced Huang’s exit, the board said it would consider internal and external candidates. Haas is about as close to both as one person gets.

He spent seven years at Nvidia and left in 2013 as vice president and general manager of its computing products business. At Arm, he worked his way up to CEO in 2022 and took the company public a year later. He’s been gone from Nvidia for 13 years, but he still talks about the place. At last year’s All-In Summit, he told a story about Huang killing a product line at an off-site and moving 2,000 engineers onto other projects overnight, when Nvidia had about 6,000 employees. He credited Huang with “vision, speed, fearlessness.”

If you’re on Nvidia’s board this week, that résumé solves a real problem. You need someone the market will believe can run a public chip company, and you need someone who won’t spend the first year learning how Nvidia makes decisions. Most outside candidates can give you one of those. Haas might give you both.

Nvidia tried to buy Arm once

Nvidia agreed in 2020 to buy Arm for $40 billion. Regulators in the U.S., U.K. and Europe objected, and the deal collapsed. Arm has since become one of Nvidia’s most important suppliers, because Nvidia’s Grace data center CPUs are built on Arm designs. Arm also licenses those designs to nearly everyone Nvidia competes with, and SoftBank owns most of it.

So hiring Haas wouldn’t just fill a seat. It would take the CEO of a company Nvidia depends on, and one it once tried to own, and leave Arm and SoftBank scrambling to replace him.

Neither stock liked the idea much. Arm’s U.S. shares were still down more than 5% Friday after trimming their losses on the report, and Nvidia was off more than 3%.

The bettors got there first

Haas was moving on prediction markets before the FT story landed. On Polymarket’s market for Nvidia’s next permanent CEO, he went from about 5% early Thursday to almost 11% by midday and was near 13% on Friday. More than $1.2 million has been bet on the market since it opened Nov. 9. Ian Buck, the Nvidia vice president who created CUDA, still leads at about 29%.

Treat those numbers as a sign of how fast this story is moving, not as reporting. They swing on every headline, and the board doesn’t take its cues from Polymarket.

The FT didn’t name any of the other candidates.

What the board is really deciding

Nvidia’s next CEO will tell us how the board sees the company after Huang. Promoting someone like Buck would say the machine Huang built can keep running without him. Bringing in a stranger would say the past week of scandal, the intelligence questions and the letters from Congress made a clean break worth the risk. Haas is the option for a board that wants a little of each.

Nvidia reports earnings Tuesday. Colette Kress will be taking the questions, and Haas will probably come up early.