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

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
There's a company nearly every chipmaker relies on that doesn't actually make anything tangible. Yet its Blockbuster IPO in September valued it above $54 billion.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:11)
It's the largest public offering in over two years.

**David Friedberg** (0:13)
The valuation of the company has tripled.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:15)
If you have a smartphone in your pocket or in front of you, you have an arm circuit somewhere inside of it.

**Rene Haas** (0:21)
We are the CPU, the heart of everything.

**Jason** (0:23)
They're the winner of the CPU side.

**Rene Haas** (0:25)
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.

**SPEAKER_6** (0:37)
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Arm CEO Rene Haas.

**Rene Haas** (0:50)
Thank you so much.

**Jason** (0:52)
Welcome, welcome.

**Rene Haas** (0:53)
David.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:53)
Hey, good to see you.

**Rene Haas** (0:54)
How you doing? Hello.

**Jason** (0:56)
Rene, what are you banging these days? Three milligrams of Alp pouches or you're up to nine? I know you're competing with Nvidia, so you probably want to go with the nine, right?

**Rene Haas** (1:03)
I will go with the nine. With Jensen, you have to go big.

**Jason** (1:07)
You have to go big with Jensen? What's that like to compete against Nvidia?

**Rene Haas** (1:12)
Well, I will say Nvidia is a customer of ours, so I'm not going to say Jensen is my competitor today. But I worked for Nvidia for many, many years, as you know, and he's fantastic, right? And I learned so much working there, working for him, working with him. And then Nvidia almost acquired Arm in 2020, so I almost had a chance to work with him again.

**Jason** (1:37)
What did you learn from Jensen?

**Rene Haas** (1:40)
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. So you have this amazing set of characteristics of vision, speed, fearlessness, taking risk, and ability to pivot very, very fast. And I saw that a lot at Nvidia. When I was there, we were only about $4 billion in sales.
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 offsite, and it was supposed to be a review of roadmaps where we were looking at each one of the general managers going through what they 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 2000 engineers off of Project X onto Project Y. And by the way, we were only about 6000 people at the time.

**Jason** (2:46)
What was Project X? What was Project Y?

**Rene Haas** (2:48)
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 the 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 onto the SOC program.

**David Sacks** (3:20)
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.

**Rene Haas** (3:28)
Took it private, yeah, for $32 billion.

**David Sacks** (3:29)
$32 billion. And then tried to sell it famously. Yes. Couldn't find a bidder.

**Rene Haas** (3:35)
Could not find a bidder.

**David Sacks** (3:36)
Hung onto it, took it public. It's now a $150 billion market cap company.

**Rene Haas** (3:41)
That's right.

**David Sacks** (3:41)
And you were telling us backstage, he famously, you know, refuses to sell a share. 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. Why does, what do they make that 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, ten years?