Arm CEO Rene Haas on AI: Nvidia Lessons, Intel's Decline and the US-China Chip War

The conversation opens by describing Arm as a company that nearly every chipmaker relies on even though it "doesn't actually make anything tangible." The introduction cites the September IPO, which valued the company above $54 billion and was called the largest public offering in over two years. It adds that the company's valuation has since tripled. The pitch is that anyone with a smartphone has an Arm circuit inside it.

We are the CPU, the heart of everything.

The opening also sets up a theme that comes back later. Foundation models and software are said to be "moving far faster than the hardware," which pushes people to invest faster and faster in new hardware. The speaker calls this "a good thing for us."

The hosts then lay out Arm's ownership history. Masayoshi Son and SoftBank took Arm private for $32 billion and then tried to sell it, but could not find a bidder. They kept it, took it public, and the company is now described as having a $150 billion market cap. The panel says they were told backstage that SoftBank refuses to sell shares, so the shareholder base has been built slowly.

Asked what it is like to compete with Nvidia, the guest pushes back on the framing: Nvidia is an Arm customer, so the guest will not call Jensen Huang a competitor "today." The guest says they worked at Nvidia for many years, and adds that Nvidia almost acquired Arm in 2020, which would have reunited them.

The guest names a set of traits shared by founders who still run companies they started 30 or 40 years ago, with Michael Dell given as another example: vision, speed, fearlessness, risk-taking and "an ability to pivot very, very fast." At the time the guest was there, Nvidia had only about $4 billion in sales and was looking at different ways to grow.