Rene Haas is half-prone on a couch in his office in San Jose, California. A basketball rests in his hand, partly obscuring his face. Haas had grimaced when WIRED’s photographer first asked him to assume this position. The headlines came to him immediately: “People are going to say ‘Arm’s CEO sleeps on the job,’” he says.
Still, Haas obliges. He gives us 46 minutes of his time, then shoos us out so he can hop on a call with Masayoshi Son, the Softbank CEO and chairman of Arm’s board.
I’m meeting with Haas just days before the chip firm’s momentous announcement that it’s launching its own silicon. For a company that’s made its fortunes licensing its architectures to other chip companies and never fabricating its own, the move is a huge bet. Apple, Tesla, Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Samsung, and Qualcomm all make or sell chips based on Arm, either licensing the chip designs or paying royalties to the firm. It’s been estimated that there are three Arm chips for every human on Earth.
Seen another way, though, making a chip marks a return to Arm’s roots. The company goes back to the late 1970s, when two computer architects started a company, Acorn Computers, that produced a microprocessor built on an architecture known as RISC. By the early ’90s the company was flailing, and the then CEO pivoted to licensing its designs to other companies. Fast-forward to the mid-2010s, and Arm’s power-efficient mobile chip designs helped make it the most important chip IP company in the world.
Arm’s trajectory hasn’t all been smooth. After Softbank acquired Arm in 2016 and took the publicly traded company private, the smartphone market’s growth slowed. Arm had to make an aggressive push into new lines of business. In 2020 Nvidia tried to scoop it up and regulators blocked the deal. As that deal collapsed, in 2022, Haas stepped into the CEO role. He took Arm public again, with Softbank still owning 90 percent of the company.
Haas had joined Arm in 2013 from Nvidia, where he’d led the computing product business unit, and eventually took over Arm’s cash cow, the IP products group. Similar to the way Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang leans on his decades-long perspective of the industry—gather ’round the campfire, kids, while I tell you about the early days of parallel computing—Haas is quick to reference 1980s geopolitical chaos when asked whether current events make him worry about his business. (No.) He’s met with President Donald Trump half a dozen times, he tells me, but he’s not particularly concerned about the US government interfering in his UK company’s affairs. He is tall, though not particularly foreboding, and often wears Saint Laurent boots with little heels, a blazer, and a Panerai watch.
Chip industry insiders say Haas, 63, is a masterful networker who pals around with the biggest names in tech. The Wall Street Journal once labeled him a “natural-born diplomat.” But with this chip project, one of the most loosely held secrets in the Valley, Arm—and Haas—risk rankling some of the company’s most loyal partners. Can you stay besties with people if, after years of polite dinner parties, you announce you’re buying their house? Haas seems convinced he can.
This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Lauren Goode: Since you became CEO, people say that there’s been a big culture change. Do you agree with that assessment?
Rene Haas: The thing that I’ve learned—I knew this intrinsically when I worked for Jensen, but I certainly internalized it when I took over here—is that the CEO sets the tone for the company.
My training, which ultimately develops who you are as a leader, was really accelerated by moving to Silicon Valley 30 years ago, working with a few startups and then working for Nvidia. And the common theme between all those companies is that I was working for founders. At the time I couldn’t tell you, “Oh, working with founders, that’s the kind of environment that I resonate with.” But looking back, that’s where I think my DNA was shaped and where I found the environment I thrive in.