Arm Holdings

Arm Holdings is a chip design company based in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England. Arm's chip designs are used in the majority of smartphones, tablets, and digital televisions across the world. In 2022, 65 percent of the world’s embedded internet of things (IoT) devices were built using Arm's system on a chip (SoC).

The original Arm Holdings headquarters were in an old barn in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England.

Arm Holdings was founded in November 1990 as Advanced RISC Machines Ltd. by Jamie Urquhart, Mike Muller, Tudor Brown, Lee Smith, John Biggs, Harry Oldham, Dave Howard, Pete Harrod, Harry Meekings, Al Thomas, Andy Merritt, and David Seal. Advanced RISC Machines was a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple Computer, and VLSI Technology. The company's original headquarters were in an old barn located in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England. Advanced RISC Machines was later abbreviated to ARM in 1998 when the company went public.

Arm's architecture was used to launch the Apple Newton in 1993. The product was not a commercial success, which led to the realization that Arm could not sustain its business on single products, and CEO Robin Saxby introduced Arm to an intellectual property (IP) business model. This allowed Arm to profit off of its processor by licensing it to other companies. In 1993, Arm signed a deal with Texas Instruments in which Texas Instruments advised Nokia to use Arm's designs for its upcoming GSM mobile phones. Nokia had previously been against using Arm because of concerns regarding memory demands and production costs of the system. In response, Arm created a custom 16-bit instruction set that lowered memory demands. The design was then licensed by Texas Instruments. Nokia accepted the deal and created the Nokia 6110, which was the first GSM phone powered by Arm. Arm's success throughout the 1990s led to a joint stock listing for the company on the London Stock Exchange and NASDAQ on April 17, 1998.

Arm continued to grow despite the technology crash of the early 2000s. Its architecture was designed into an increasing number of system on a chip (SoC) circuits, especially in cell phones for which Arm had become the de facto standard. However, it was hard IP and could not readily be applied to other technologies. This limited Arm's revenue opportunities, so Arm decided to produce a synthesizable core that could be freely licensed and was not tied to a specific technology. In 2001, Arm announced the ARM926EJ-S, which was eventually licensed by over 100 silicon vendors globally and has shipped billions of units since its release. Following that, Arm introduced the Cortex processor family while trying to match pace with the burgeoning cell phone and smartphone market. By the early 2010s, Arm had a 96 percent share in the mobile market.

In June 2010, Arm Holdings, along with Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson, and Texas Instruments, founded the non-profit open-source software company Linaro. Linaro was created to assist Linux developers in speeding up the rollout of Linux-based devices. In April 2011, Arm Holdings was awarded the Queen's Award for Enterprise for the development of its semiconductor intellectual property (IP).

On November 19, 2015, OpenFog Consortium was founded by Arm Holdings, Cisco Systems, Dell, Intel, Microsoft, and Princeton University. It was a public-private ecosystem formed to accelerate the adoption of fog computing in order to solve the bandwidth, latency, and communications challenges that were associated with various concepts in the digitized world, like the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI). OpenFog Consortium later joined the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) in 2019.

On September 5, 2016, SoftBank Group acquired Arm Holdings. The acquisition resulted in Arm becoming a private company with SoftBank as its controlling shareholder. Arm underwent a rebrand in August 2017. The company changed its logo and began stylizing the name as Arm rather than ARM.

In April 2018, Arm joined nearly thirty other companies in founding the Cybersecurity Tech Accord, a four-point cybersecurity pact in which the signatories pledge to do their utmost to defend customers from malicious attacks by cybercriminal enterprises and nation-states. Other members include Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Facebook, and Oracle. In October 2019, Arm became a founding member of the Autonomous Vehicle Computing Consortium (AVCC), an initiative focused on accelerating the delivery of safer and affordable autonomous vehicles at scale.

On September 13, 2020, Nvidia announced its intention to purchase Arm from SoftBank Group for $40 billion "to create the premier computing company for the age of artificial intelligence." In December 2021, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued to block the deal over concerns that it would “stifle” competition for multiple technologies and give Nvidia a way to “undermine” its competing companies. The deal was called off in February 2022. Arm filed for an initial public offering (IPO) in August 2023. The IPO launched on September 14, 2023, on Nasdaq, opening at $56.10 a share after having been priced at $51 the day prior. Shares closed that day at $63.59, giving Arm a market value of $68 billion.