# Arm Holdings

Arm Holdings plc is a British semiconductor and software design company headquartered in Cambridge, England, known for designing CPU cores based on the ARM architecture. Its technology is used in virtually all modern smartphones and increasingly in AI data centers and edge devices.

Arm Holdings plc is a British semiconductor and software design company headquartered in Cambridge, England. Its primary business is the design of central processing unit (CPU) cores that implement the ARM architecture family of instruction sets, which are licensed to other companies rather than manufactured directly by Arm. The company also designs other chips, provides software development tools under brands such as DS-5, RealView, and Keil, and offers systems, platforms, system-on-chip (SoC) infrastructure, and software. As a holding company, Arm also holds shares in other companies. Since 2016, it has been majority owned by the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group.

The acronym 'ARM' originally stood for Acorn RISC Machine and later for Advanced RISC Machines. ARM CPUs first appeared in the desktop computer Acorn Archimedes, but today's systems include mostly embedded systems, with ARM-based processors used in virtually all modern smartphones and even in some of the fastest supercomputers. Processors based on designs licensed from Arm, or designed by licensees of one of the ARM instruction set architectures, are used across all classes of computing devices, including those optimized for [artificial-intelligence](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/artificial-intelligence) workloads at the edge and in data centers.

## CPU and GPU Architecture

Arm's CPU designs are widely recognized for their energy efficiency, which has made them the dominant choice in mobile and embedded markets. The company's core competitors in server processors include [intel](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/intel), [amd](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/amd), and IBM, while Intel also competed with ARM-based chips in mobile devices for a period, though Arm has faced no direct competition in that specific space in recent years; instead, vendors of actual ARM-based chips compete among themselves. For graphics processing units (GPUs), Arm offers two product lines: Mali, which has been widely used in mobile devices, and the newer Immortalis series, which includes hardware-based ray-tracing support. Main competitors in mobile GPUs include [qualcomm](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/qualcomm) with its Adreno line and former PowerVR (now owned by another technology firm), while Nvidia, AMD, Samsung, and Intel have increasingly invested in GPU designs for various computing segments.

Notably, several of Arm's GPU competitors also license its CPU technology. Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics, and Nvidia have all combined their own GPUs with Arm-licensed CPU cores in various products, reflecting the complementary nature of the ecosystem where a manufacturer might pair a third-party GPU with a Arm-designed CPU.

## History and Founding

The company was founded on 12 November 1990 as Widelogic Limited, but the name was rapidly changed on 3 December 1990 to Advanced RISC Machines Limited, structured as a joint venture between Acorn Computers, [apple](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/apple), and VLSI Technology. Acorn provided 12 original employees, VLSI contributed tools, and Apple invested $3 million USD (equivalent to roughly $7 million in 2025). Larry Tesler, an Apple vice president, was a key figure in establishing the venture and helped recruit the first CEO, Robin Saxby. The company's goal was to further develop the Acorn RISC Machine processor, which had been used in the Acorn Archimedes and selected by Apple for its Newton project. Arm's first profitable year was 1993, and it opened offices in Silicon Valley and Tokyo in 1994. In 1997, Arm invested in Palmchip Corporation to develop system-on-chip platforms and enter the disk drive market. In 1998, the company changed its name Advanced RISC Machines Ltd. to Arm Ltd. and was first listed on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and Nasdaq in 1998.

In 2010, Arm joined with IBM, Texas Instruments, Samsung, [Qualcomm](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/qualcomm), and others to form Linaro, a non-profit open-source engineering company focused on advancing toolchain and kernel development for ARM-based platforms. This collaboration underscored the cooperative relationships among semiconductor firms that often competed elsewhere.

## The Name and Styling

The acronym ARM was first used in 1983 as 'Acorn RISC Machine' for the Acorn Archimedes, which was one of the first systems to use a RISC processor. When the company was only incorporated in 1990, the acronym changed to 'Advanced RISC Machines' at the behest of Apple, which according to Steve Furber did not want a competitor's name (Acorn) in the company name. At the time of the IPO in 1998, the company name was changed to 'ARM Holdings', but it was often called ARM like the processors. On 1 August 2017, the company updated its styling and logo; the logo became all lowercase 'arm', and other uses of the name are now capitalized in sentence case as 'Arm'.

## Initial Ownership and Public Listing

Prior to 2016, Arm had a primary listing on the London Stock Exchange and was a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. It also had a secondary listing of American depositary receipts on New York's Nasdaq. However, Japanese multinational conglomerate SoftBank Group made an agreed offer for Arm on 18 July 2016, valuing the company at £24.3 billion (US$32 billion), and the transaction was completed on 5 September 2016. In 2017, a 25% stake in Arm was transferred to the SoftBank Vision Fund, which received investment from the Saudi sovereign fund.

## Attempted Acquisition by Nvidia and IPO

American technology company Nvidia announced plans on 13 September 2020 to acquire Arm from SoftBank for US$40 billion in stock and cash, which would have been the largest semiconductor merger at that time. SoftBank would have acquired an almost 10% stake in Nvidia, and Arm would have kept its Cambridge headquarters. The deal faced opposition on national security grounds from the UK, and competition concerns from other tech companies such as Alphabet's Google, Microsoft, and Qualcomm, whose products heavily on Arm's intellectual property. Also battling the deal was arm China, a subsidiary where a majority stake was held by Chinese investors. The acquisition was initially expected to close by the end of 2022, but the European Commission, UK Competition and Markets Authority, and US Federal Trade Commission raised concerns, and the merger was called off in February 2022.

After this, Arm filed for an IPO on 21 August 2023 on the Nasdaq, rather than the London Stock Exchange. Shortly before that, SoftBank Group bought back the 25% stake from Vision Fund for around $16 billion, valuing Arm at over $64 billion. Arm went public on 14 September 2023, raising US$4.87 billion at a US$54.5 billion valuation, with SoftBank retaining a roughly 90% ownership stake after the offering.

## Role in AI and Modern Computing

Arm's architecture plays a significant role in the [artificial-intelligence](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/artificial-intelligence) landscape. While its cores are dominant in edge devices like smartphones and Iems from the internet of things, Arm designs have also gained traction in data centers. Hyper-scale cloud providers such as [amazon-web-services](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/amazon-web-services), aws have introduced custom processors based on Arm cores for certain compute and AI tasks, and that vendors offer Arm-based instances for [machine-learning](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/machine-learning) workloads, among other uses. The energy efficiency of these designs is particularly suitable for large-scale deployment in data centers and at the edge, where power constraints matter. Arm is also integrated into systems from suppliers like [[], which build AI accelerators that often pair with Arm-based host processors.

## Reported Approach for Cerebras Systems

 In May 2026, Bloomberg News reported that Arm Holdings and its majority owner, compile, had made a preliminary approach to acquire the wafer-scale integrated circuit maker [cerebras](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/cerebras), which developed a custom AI chip called Cerebras Wafer-Scale Engine. According to the report, the approach was rebuffed, and Cerebras subsequently pursued its own initial public offering. This indicated Arm's intentions to strengthen its position in AI-specific hardware and its willingness to consider significant acquisitions.



---
Source: https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/arm-holdings
License: CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)
Last updated: 2026-09-05T13:21:18.127033+00:00