> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.implicator.ai/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Nvidia's Board Eyes the Man Behind Apple's Chips - URL: https://www.implicator.ai/johny-srouji-nvidia-apple-chips-portrait/ - Published: 2026-11-14T17:01:34.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-14T17:01:34.000Z - Description: Johny Srouji built Apple's chips for one company's products. One unnamed source says Nvidia, which sells chips to outside customers, is weighing him as CEO. - Author: Marcus Schuler - Tags: AI News, #home-companion, Nvidia In a pattern-making shop outside Haifa, Johny Srouji spent weekends and summers helping his father make wooden moldings for engine parts and medical equipment. Farid Srouji charged less for complicated work and more for easy jobs. The complicated jobs were the ones he wanted. “If there was a very complex thing that he'd never done, he wanted to do it,” his son recalled in [a 2016 interview](https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-johny-srouji-apple-chief-chipmaker/?ref=implicator.ai). Farid kept telling the boy to get an education rather than settle into the family business. His son is now a name in the search for Nvidia's next chief executive. On Nov. 11, as Nvidia's board weighed removing Jensen Huang, [Semafor reported](https://semafor.com/article/11/11/2026/nvidia-board-preparing-to-oust-ceo-huang-wsj?ref=implicator.ai), citing one person familiar with the matter, that Srouji was being considered for the top job. Huang resigned on Nov. 12; chief financial officer Colette Kress is interim CEO; the board's filing says it will consider internal and external candidates and names nobody. Nobody has said Srouji was approached or wants the job, and Apple has not commented. Srouji, Apple's chief hardware officer, has spent 18 years building chips for one company's own products and in 2023 said Apple keeps a lean portfolio of chips because it does not sell them to other companies. Nvidia sells its chips to outside customers. The Breakdown - Semafor reported on Nov. 11, citing one person familiar with the matter, that Nvidia was considering Apple chief hardware officer Johny Srouji as CEO. Nobody has said he was approached or wants the job. - Srouji grew up in a Christian Arab family in Haifa, studied computer science at the Technion and worked at IBM and Intel before Apple hired him in 2008 to lead the A4 chip. - His teams shipped the A7, the first 64-bit smartphone chip, pulled the A9X forward by half a year and moved the Mac from Intel to Apple's own M-series processors. - Apple's in-house modem missed its 2023 and 2024 targets before the C1 launched in 2025, and Srouji told Tim Cook in December 2025 he was considering leaving. AI-generated summary, reviewed by an editor. [More on our AI guidelines](https://www.implicator.ai/about/). ## Haifa Srouji grew up in downtown Haifa's Abbas neighborhood, the third of four children in a Christian Arab family. “Haifa is one of the most integrated cities in Israel,” he said in 2016\. “Integration worked for me.” He earned perfect high-school grades in math, physics and chemistry. A teacher who also taught at the Technion introduced him to computers. “I fell in love,” Srouji said. At the Technion, he spent late nights in the computer lab drafting code in pencil, earning bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science. His master's thesis concerned new ways to test software and hardware systems. At IBM's research lab in Haifa, he worked on distributed systems, in which computers in different locations work together. Oded Cohn, his first boss, remembered assignments coming back complete and perfect within a day. He wondered whether Srouji was brilliant or simply didn't sleep. “In some cases, the conclusion was both,” Cohn said. In 1999, he used a 20-minute car ride with Intel manager Uri Weiser to lobby for a three-year assignment at the company's Austin research hub. Weiser, a fellow Israeli, assumed Srouji was Jewish and invited him to an Israeli Memorial Day event at a Texas synagogue. “He looked at me and said, 'I'm a Christian Arab,'” Weiser recalled. Srouji went anyway. “He was there sitting with a kippah in the synagogue and following everything.” Accounts of Srouji's IBM and Intel years disagree on order and dates, but he was at IBM when Bob Mansfield recruited him to Apple. ## The Apple chips Mansfield, Apple's top hardware executive, promised him the chance to build something from scratch. He joined in 2008 to lead the A4, Apple's first in-house system-on-a-chip: a chip carrying the processor alongside functions such as image processing and storage control. Apple then had about 40 engineers integrating other companies' chips into the iPhone. Its April 2008 acquisition of P.A. Semi added about 150. FREE AI BRIEFING · WEEKDAYS Follow the fight for Nvidia's top job. Get the AI stories shaping the day, with concise context from San Francisco. The briefing takes about five minutes and arrives at 4:45 a.m. Pacific, 7:45 a.m. Eastern. Email address Keep me informed Check your inbox for the confirmation link. Free. No hype. Unsubscribe anytime. The A4 reached customers in the iPad and iPhone 4 in 2010\. “The airplane was taking off, and I was building the runway just in time,” Srouji said. The A7, which arrived in the iPhone 5s in 2013, was the first 64-bit smartphone chip. Qualcomm scrapped its 32-bit development to catch up. “The A7 really turned the world upside down,” said Ryan Smith, then editor-in-chief of the semiconductor-review site AnandTech. The iPad Pro presented a different problem. Its planned spring unveiling slipped to the fall of 2015 because other parts of the product weren't ready. The tablet would now appear alongside the iPhone 6s and its faster A9 processor, making the older chip intended for the Pro look dated at launch. Srouji put his engineers on a crash program to bring the A9X tablet processor forward by half a year. They finished in time. The A9X push earned him a place on Tim Cook's management team as senior vice president of Hardware Technologies in December 2015, along with about 90,000 additional Apple shares vesting over four years. For the Mac, his organization developed the M-series processors to replace Intel chips. Covid struck during validation of the M1, when engineers still needed access to physical hardware. The team installed cameras in laboratories so engineers could inspect chips remotely. The M1 shipped in November 2020. “We don't make bets, we take risks,” Srouji [said in 2022](https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-from-haifa-to-silicon-valley-apple-svp-offers-tech-career-advice-1001416676?ref=implicator.ai). By that year's reporting, his chip organization had grown to over a thousand engineers worldwide. ## The meetings An engineer who sat in on Srouji's early Apple meetings recalled in 2016 that engineers who presented to him prepared extensively. His approval mattered to whether a feature would go ahead, and he pressed them on contingency options if a design failed, the engineer said. In 2022, people who worked with him described his meetings as concentrating on problems rather than successes. “You get one transistor wrong, it's done, game over,” he said in 2016\. “Each one of those transistors has to work. Silicon is very unforgiving.” The testing work that occupied him at the Technion and Intel continued inside Apple's laboratories. Equipment ran checks on future chip designs for months before completion. “We beat the silicon as much as we can,” he said. “If you're lucky and rigorous, you find the mistakes before you ship.” Cook didn't scrutinize his budget, Srouji said in 2016\. “I run it very tight.” “If you become sloppy because you have too much money, that's the wrong mindset.” His rule was that “if it's not gated by physics, that means it's hard but doable.” Weiser encountered Apple's secrecy even on a friendly visit. When Weiser came to Cupertino to give a talk, an assistant escorted him to Srouji's empty office. The papers on the desk were turned upside down. Srouji arrived and moved his former Intel colleague out. Know someone who'd find this useful? [✉️ Email it to a friend in one click](mailto:?subject=A%20newsletter%20I%20think%20you%27d%20like&body=This%20is%20one%20of%20maybe%20three%20newsletters%20I%20actually%20read.%20The%20rest%20just%20pile%20up%2C%20unread%2C%20judging%20me.%0A%0AAnd%20yes%2C%20this%20email%20mostly%20wrote%20itself%2C%20which%20is%20a%20little%20on%20the%20nose%20for%20an%20AI%20newsletter.%20Doesn%27t%20make%20it%20wrong.%20implicator.ai%20is%20good.%0A%0ASubscribe%20free%3A%20https%3A%2F%2Fwww.implicator.ai%2Fsubscribe%2F%3Futm%5Fsource%3Dnewsletter%26utm%5Fmedium%3Dforward%26utm%5Fcampaign%3Demail%5Fforward), or they can [subscribe free here](https://www.implicator.ai/subscribe/?utm%5Fsource=newsletter&utm%5Fmedium=forward&utm%5Fcampaign=forward%5Fto%5Fcolleague). “We are at Apple, you can't sit here,” Srouji told him. The secretary would escort Weiser if he needed the bathroom. ## The modem In December 2019, Srouji flew to Munich to meet wireless engineers Apple had acquired from Intel. He told the gathering the modem project would be the next step in Apple's evolution, according to people who watched the meeting. A 2023 Wall Street Journal investigation, citing people familiar with the work, described teams split into separate groups across the U.S. and abroad without a global leader and managers who discouraged engineers from airing bad news about setbacks, leading to unrealistic goals. Apple [abandoned plans to use the chips in its 2023 models](https://daringfireball.net/2023/09/craptacular%5Fis%5Fmore%5Flike%5Fit?ref=implicator.ai). The planned rollout moved to 2024, and executives realized they would miss that target too. The available accounts don't establish whether the managers who discouraged bad news reported directly to Srouji or how he responded when the delays surfaced. “These delays indicate Apple didn't anticipate the complexity of the effort,” said Serge Willenegger, a longtime Qualcomm executive who left in 2018\. He said he didn't know the current state of Apple's chip. “Cellular is a monster.” Apple launched C1, its first in-house cellular modem, in 2025\. By August 2026, the work to replace Qualcomm modem components was nearing completion. ## The possible departure Srouji had already considered leaving. In December 2025, he told Cook he was seriously weighing an exit and told colleagues he would join another company if he went. Days later, he [sent his team a memo](https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/08/apple-silicon-chief-johny-srouji-reportedly-commits-to-staying-at-apple-for-now/?ref=implicator.ai): “I love my team, and I love my job at Apple, and I don't plan on leaving anytime soon.” Apple [named him chief hardware officer on April 20, 2026](https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/04/johny-srouji-named-apples-chief-hardware-officer/?ref=implicator.ai). He added the hardware engineering organization previously run by John Ternus to the technologies group he already led. He now reports to Ternus, who succeeded Cook as Apple's chief executive, and oversees product engineering as well as components including chips and batteries. In August, people close to Srouji, then 61, said it was only a matter of time before he weighed leaving again, perhaps in as little as a year or two. Apple had no equivalent figure ready to take over the combined job; his departure would likely mean splitting the hardware groups again, the same people said. Most of what Srouji has said in public about his work comes from a handful of interviews between 2016 and 2023, and he has said nothing in public about Nvidia. Speaking in 2022 about the internal debate over replacing Intel processors in the Mac with Apple's own chips, he said: “First and foremost, if we do this, can we deliver better products?” “It's not about the chip,” he said. “Apple is not a chip company.” Frequently Asked Questions Who is Johny Srouji? Srouji is Apple's chief hardware officer, a role he took on April 20, 2026\. He reports to CEO John Ternus and leads both hardware engineering and the hardware technologies group, which includes Apple's chips. He joined Apple in 2008 to lead the A4, the company's first in-house system-on-a-chip. Is Srouji going to run Nvidia? Unknown. Semafor reported on Nov. 11, citing one person familiar with the matter, that he was being considered. Nvidia's board says it will look at internal and external candidates and has named nobody. Nobody has said he was approached or wants the job, and Apple has not commented. Who is running Nvidia now? Chief financial officer Colette Kress is interim CEO. Jensen Huang resigned on Nov. 12, 2026, and the board is searching for a permanent successor. What went wrong with Apple's modem? Apple scrapped plans to use its own modem in its 2023 models and then missed a 2024 target too. A 2023 Wall Street Journal investigation described siloed teams without a global leader and managers who discouraged bad news. Apple launched its first in-house modem, the C1, in 2025. Has Srouji tried to leave Apple before? Yes. In December 2025 he told Tim Cook he was seriously considering leaving, then told his team days later he did not plan to leave anytime soon. Apple expanded his role in April 2026\. In August, people close to him said he might weigh an exit again in as little as a year or two. AI-generated summary, reviewed by an editor. [More on our AI guidelines](https://www.implicator.ai/about/). [Huang's exit rattles Nvidia shares; Cerebras hits a capacity wallIMPLICATOR .ai Morning Briefing · From San Francisco Friday, November 13, 2026 9 stops From San Francisco 1 The Editorial Good morning. Control is proving elusiThe Implicator![](https://www.implicator.ai/content/images/2026/11/20261112-191426-nl_lobby_exit.webp)](https://www.implicator.ai/huang-quits-nvidia-cerebras-capacity-wall/) [Breaking News: Jensen Huang's Resignation Sends Nvidia Shares TumblingJensen Huang, Nvidia’s co-founder and chief executive since 1993, resigned Thursday, Nov. 12, leaving his posts as president, CEO and director effective immediately, the board said. Nvidia shares dropThe Implicator![](https://www.implicator.ai/content/images/2026/05/breaking.png)](https://www.implicator.ai/jensen-huang-resigns-nvidia-ceo-kress-interim/) [Colette Kress Takes Nvidia's Helm as the Board Hunts Huang's HeirIn September 2013, in her first week as Nvidia's chief financial officer, Colette Kress asked her new boss how long he thought he would want her in the role. Jensen Huang had interviewed 22 candidatesThe Implicator![](https://www.implicator.ai/content/images/2026/11/20261112-092948-kress_nvidia_interim.webp)](https://www.implicator.ai/colette-kress-nvidia-interim-ceo-succession/)