The Cambridge firm behind nearly every smartphone chip began with twelve engineers and Apple cash
Arm makes no chips of its own. It designs processor cores and licenses them, and those designs sit inside virtually every modern smartphone and even the world's fastest supercomputer. The company started in 1990 as a joint venture of Acorn, Apple and VLSI, with a dozen staff and $3 million from Apple.
The letters first appeared in 1983 as Acorn RISC Machine, the processor inside Acorn's Archimedes desktop and one of the first reduced-instruction-set chips in a small computer. When the business was spun out in 1990, the acronym became Advanced RISC Machines; engineer Steve Furber recalled that Apple did not want a rival's name on a company it backed. Registered on 12 November 1990 as Widelogic Limited, it was renamed within weeks. Acorn supplied 12 employees, VLSI Technology provided tools and Apple invested, partly because it had picked the chip for its Newton handheld. Apple executive Larry Tesler helped recruit the first chief executive, Robin Saxby.
Profit arrived in 1993, offices in Silicon Valley and Tokyo in 1994, and a listing in London and on Nasdaq in 1998, by which time the name was ARM Holdings. Apple's stake had shrunk to 14.8 per cent by February 1999. Since 2017 the brand has been styled in lower case. Besides CPU cores it sells software tools and graphics processors under the Mali and Immortalis names. In phones it faces no rival architecture; in servers it competes with Intel, AMD and IBM.
Japan's SoftBank Group agreed to buy the company in July 2016 and completed the deal on 5 September that year, later moving a quarter of it into its Vision Fund. In September 2020 Nvidia offered US$40 billion, which would have been the largest semiconductor takeover yet. Regulators in Europe, Britain and the United States raised competition worries, Britain added national security concerns, and companies such as Google, Microsoft and Qualcomm objected. The bid collapsed in February 2022.
SoftBank instead floated Arm on Nasdaq in 2023 at a valuation of US$54.5 billion. In May 2026 Bloomberg reported that Arm and SoftBank had approached chipmaker Cerebras Systems about a takeover shortly before its planned share sale, and had been turned away.
Source: Arm Holdings
