Rene Haas is chief executive of Arm, the chip designer behind the processors in 99 per cent of all smartphones. After being bought by SoftBank in 2016, the UK-headquartered company became last year’s biggest initial public offering, in a deal valuing it at $54.5bn on Nasdaq. Since then, Arm’s market capitalisation has nearly tripled to around $140bn, as it has been caught in the updraft of investor excitement about artificial intelligence.
Based in Silicon Valley, Haas has worked in the industry for almost 40 years, including seven years at AI chipmaker Nvidia before joining Arm in 2013. Since becoming chief executive in 2022, he has pushed Arm to diversify further from its mobile phone roots into PCs, automotive and industrial components and, increasingly, servers — all underpinned by the same promise of power efficiency that has kept its technology at the heart of the iPhone.
Arm does not manufacture its own processors — though a recent report suggested that may soon change — instead licensing a growing array of designs to the biggest names in the tech industry, including Microsoft, Nvidia, Apple, Google, Samsung, Amazon, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.