Arm Holdings
Arm Holdings plc is a British semiconductor and software design company headquartered in Cambridge, England. Its principal business is designing central processing unit cores implementing the ARM architecture family of instruction sets. It also designs other chips, supplies software development tools, and provides systems, platforms and system-on-chip infrastructure. Since 2016 it has been majority owned by the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group.
| Arm Holdings plc | |
|---|---|
| Type | Public |
| Traded as | Nasdaq: ARM |
| Industry | Semiconductor intellectual property |
| Founded | 12 November 1990 |
| Founder | Joint venture of Acorn Computers, Apple and VLSI Technology |
| Headquarters | Cambridge, England, United Kingdom |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Key people | Rene Haas (CEO) |
| Products | Cortex CPU cores, Neoverse, Mali and Immortalis GPUs |
| Services | Architecture licensing, design tools |
| Parent | SoftBank Group (approximately 90 per cent) |
| Website | arm.com |
Arm does not manufacture chips. It licenses designs and instruction set architectures to companies that build their own silicon, a business model that has made its architecture ubiquitous while leaving its revenue a small fraction of the value of the products containing it. Processors based on Arm designs, or designed by licensees of its instruction sets, appear in virtually all modern smartphones and in devices ranging from embedded controllers to the fastest supercomputers.
The company has two lines of graphics processors, Mali and the newer Immortalis, which includes hardware ray tracing.
Name
The acronym ARM was first used in 1983 for Acorn RISC Machine. Acorn Computers' first reduced instruction set processor was used in the original Acorn Archimedes and was among the first RISC processors used in small computers.
When the company was incorporated in 1990 the expansion changed to Advanced RISC Machines. According to Steve Furber the change was made at the request of Apple, which did not wish a competitor's name to appear in the name of the company. At the 1998 flotation the name became ARM Holdings. On 1 August 2017 the styling changed to lowercase in the logo and sentence case elsewhere, as Arm.
History
Founding
The company was founded on 12 November 1990 as Widelogic Limited, renamed Advanced RISC Machines Limited on 3 December 1990 and structured as a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple and VLSI Technology. Acorn provided twelve employees, VLSI provided tools and Apple invested three million dollars. Larry Tesler, an Apple vice president, was a central figure and helped recruit the first chief executive, Robin Saxby.
The venture was intended to develop the Acorn RISC Machine processor, used in the Archimedes and selected by Apple for its Newton handheld project. Its first profitable year was 1993, and offices opened in Silicon Valley and Tokyo in 1994. Arm invested in Palmchip Corporation in 1997 to provide system-on-chip platforms and enter the disk drive market, and changed its name to ARM Ltd in 1998.
The company listed on the London Stock Exchange and Nasdaq in 1998. By February 1999 Apple's shareholding had fallen to 14.8 per cent.
The licensing model proved decisive. By selling designs rather than chips, Arm could be adopted by companies that competed fiercely with one another, and the resulting volume made its instruction set the default for battery-powered devices. Its main competitors in servers are IBM, Intel and AMD. Intel competed with Arm-based chips in mobile devices but withdrew, and Arm now faces no architectural competition in that segment, although vendors of Arm-based chips compete among themselves. Its graphics competitors include Imagination Technologies, Qualcomm, Nvidia, Samsung and Intel, several of which combine their own graphics with Arm-licensed processors.
In 2010 Arm joined IBM, Texas Instruments, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Freescale Semiconductor in forming Linaro, a non-profit open source engineering organisation.
SoftBank acquisition
SoftBank Group made an agreed offer for Arm on 18 July 2016 valuing the company at 23.4 billion pounds, approximately 32 billion dollars. The transaction completed on 5 September 2016 and removed Arm from the London market. In 2017 a 25 per cent stake was transferred to the SoftBank Vision Fund, which had received investment from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund.
Attempted Nvidia acquisition
On 13 September 2020 Nvidia announced plans to acquire Arm from SoftBank for 40 billion dollars in stock and cash, which would have been the largest semiconductor acquisition to that date. SoftBank would have taken slightly under ten per cent of Nvidia, and Arm would have kept its Cambridge headquarters.
Opposition was extensive. The United Kingdom raised national security concerns. Technology companies including Google, Microsoft and Qualcomm, whose products depend heavily on Arm intellectual property, objected on competition grounds, arguing that ownership by a chip designer would compromise Arm's neutrality between licensees. Arm China, a subsidiary in which Chinese investors held a majority stake, also resisted.
The European Commission, the United Kingdom Competition and Markets Authority and the United States Federal Trade Commission all raised concerns. The transaction was abandoned in February 2022.
Return to public markets
Arm filed for a flotation on 21 August 2023, choosing Nasdaq rather than the London Stock Exchange, a decision treated in Britain as a significant setback for the London market. Days earlier SoftBank bought back the 25 per cent stake from the Vision Fund for approximately 16 billion dollars, valuing Arm at over 64 billion dollars.
The company went public on 14 September 2023, raising 4.87 billion dollars at a 54.5 billion dollar valuation, with SoftBank retaining roughly 90 per cent.
In May 2026 Bloomberg News reported that Arm and SoftBank had made a preliminary approach to acquire the wafer-scale processor manufacturer Cerebras Systems in the weeks before its planned flotation, and that the approach was rebuffed.
Controversies
Arm China
Arm's Chinese joint venture became the subject of a protracted governance dispute. In 2020 the Arm China board voted to remove its chief executive Allen Wu, who refused to leave, retaining the company seal required under Chinese law to execute documents and continuing to control the entity for nearly two years. The affair, resolved in 2022, exposed the difficulty of maintaining control of a majority-Chinese-owned subsidiary holding rights to distribute Arm technology in its largest growth market.
Licensing model and Qualcomm litigation
Arm sued Qualcomm in 2022 over the latter's use of architecture licences following its acquisition of the chip designer Nuvia, arguing that Nuvia's licences could not be transferred without consent. A jury found largely for Qualcomm in December 2024. The dispute drew attention because Arm appeared to be seeking to change the economics of its relationship with licensees, charging royalties based on device value rather than chip value, a shift several major customers resisted.
Neutrality and competition with licensees
Arm's reported moves toward designing and selling complete chips rather than only licensable cores have raised concerns among licensees that it would compete with the customers on whom its business depends. The same concern underlay opposition to the Nvidia acquisition, and it remains a structural tension in the company's strategy.
Ownership and national interest
Both the SoftBank acquisition and the attempted Nvidia sale prompted debate in the United Kingdom about foreign ownership of nationally significant technology companies, and the choice of Nasdaq over London for the 2023 flotation intensified a wider discussion about the competitiveness of British capital markets.
See also
References