A British-based, American-listed, Japanese-controlled chip-design firm. Arm does not sell a single chip: customers license its designs, tweak them if they wish, and produce the chips themselves (or have them made). Arm pockets an upfront licence fee and a slim per-chip royalty. More than 300bn chips built on its designs have been shipped—over 30bn last year alone. Its designs sit in almost all the world's smartphones and most other connected devices.
SoftBank, the Japanese conglomerate, owns more than 85% of Arm. Masayoshi Son, SoftBank's boss, has been assembling a chip portfolio around the firm, buying Ampere (server processors) and Graphcore (AI chips), and acquiring 2% of Intel for $2bn.
Arm's speciality is power-efficient general-purpose processors called central processing units (CPUs). Designing a new CPU can cost hundreds of millions of dollars and take 12-18 months; an off-the-shelf Arm blueprint spares customers much of that burden. Apple, Nvidia, Amazon and Google all use Arm designs. Analysts expected revenue in fiscal year 2026 to be around $5bn, with half from royalties and the rest from licensing fees—up about 20% from 2025. According to Visible Alpha, Arm earned royalties of $0.86 per mobile chip, or 2.5-5% of the selling price. Its market value stood at $135bn.
For most of its history Arm sold designs for individual processors—"Lego bricks". More recently it has started selling blueprints for pre-assembled blocks of processors known as "subsystems", which Bloomberg Intelligence estimates bring three times as much revenue per chip. Arm believes subsystems could make up over half of its royalties within a couple of years.
The data centres powering AI are built around graphics processing units (GPUs), but also need CPUs. Nvidia uses Arm designs for its CPUs, as do cloud giants. Arm's boss, Rene Haas, argues that as AI workloads shift from training to inference—where models respond to user queries—demand for efficient, general-purpose processors should rise, spreading beyond data centres into phones, wearables and cars.
China accounts for about a fifth of Arm's revenue. China's government is promoting RISC-V, an open-source chip architecture, as a domestic alternative to Arm and Intel designs. Haas says the vast software ecosystem around Arm's chips, with millions of developers, gives the firm a big advantage.
Rene Haas is Arm's chief executive. He also sits on SoftBank's board.
No one can have a higher opinion of him than I have, and I think he's a dirty little beast.