Nvidia board dials Arm's Rene Haas in hunt for post-Huang CEO

Nvidia's board has reached out to Arm Holdings chief executive Rene Haas as it hunts for a replacement for Jensen Huang, the Financial Times reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. Huang walked away from the CEO job after reports surfaced that he had an affair with a suspected Chinese intelligence source. Haas, who runs the chip-design house Nvidia has leaned on for its architecture, now sits on the board's shortlist.

Washington is still churning. Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott asked both Huang and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to testify, pointing to the 'serious concerns' raised by recent reporting, and Lutnick agreed to appear before the panel, per NBC. The Wall Street Journal reported that White House advisers are pushing blame toward Lutnick, arguing his agency dragged its feet on blacklisting Chinese firms and left Nvidia's AI chip sales loosely supervised.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, meanwhile, played defense for the company. In a CNBC interview Friday, he called Nvidia a 'fantastic' company and said it can move past the exit of its founder. Bessent also addressed reports that he confronted Lutnick in the Oval Office over the delay in adding Megaspeed, a Singapore-based firm caught up in the China espionage controversy, to the entity list.