Arm Holdings: Apple's Newton, a Rogue China CEO and the Failed Nvidia Deal

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Arm was founded in 1990 as a joint venture of Acorn Computers, VLSI Technology and Apple. Apple needed a low-power processor for its Newton handheld and invested $3 million, with executive Larry Tesler helping recruit CEO Robin Saxby. Acorn contributed 12 engineers and its Acorn RISC Machine design, and VLSI supplied chip design tools. Apple refused to have a competitor's name on its processor, so Acorn RISC Machine became Advanced RISC Machines. Arm makes no chips: it designs architectures and instruction sets and licenses them, from Cortex-A for phones and Cortex-M for microcontrollers to Neoverse for cloud servers, offering either core licenses or architectural licenses like Apple's.

The reduced instruction set approach uses simpler circuits that draw less power and make less heat, which carried Arm into PDAs, iPods, iPads, nearly all smartphones, Apple's M-series Macs and supercomputers such as Japan's Fugaku and Europe's JUPITER. SoftBank bought Arm in 2016 for 24.3 billion pounds and in 2020 agreed to sell it to Nvidia for $40 billion, but opposition from Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm and regulators in the UK, EU and US ended the deal in February 2022. SoftBank then listed Arm on the Nasdaq in September 2023 at a $54.5 billion valuation.

• Around 2023 Arm moved toward charging royalties on the value of the whole device rather than the chip.
• In 2018 SoftBank sold a majority of Arm China to a consortium of Chinese investors.
• When the board voted to fire Arm China CEO Allen Wu in 2020, he kept control because he held the physical company seal.
• Filings ousted Wu in April 2022, and in 2023 former Arm China staff formed rival startup Borui Jingxin.
• Cadence bought Arm's Artisan physical IP unit in 2025, and 2026 reports said Arm sought to acquire Cerebras.