Arm Holdings plc (formerly an acronym for Advanced RISC Machines and originally Acorn RISC Machine) is a British semiconductor and software design company based in Cambridge, England, whose primary business is the design of central processing unit (CPU) cores that implement the ARM architecture family of instruction sets.

Arm has two lines of graphics processing units (GPUs), Mali, and the newer Immortalis (which includes hardware-based ray-tracing).

Arm had a primary listing on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and was a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index.

[10][11] A planned takeover deal by Nvidia, announced in 2020, collapsed in February 2022,[12] with SoftBank subsequently deciding to pursue an initial public offering on the Nasdaq in 2023, valuing Arm at US$54.5 billion.

[17][18] Larry Tesler, Apple VP was a key person and he helped recruit the first CEO at the joint venture, Robin Saxby.

ARM invested in Palmchip Corporation in 1997 to provide system on chip platforms and to enter into the disk drive market.

[60] American technology company Nvidia announced plans on 13 September 2020 to acquire ARM from SoftBank, pending regulatory approval, for a value of US$40 billion in stock and cash, which would have been the largest semiconductor acquisition to that date.

[80][81][82] SoftBank Group sold more than half of Arm China in 2018 to a local consortium consisting of various parties including China Investment Corp. and the Silk Road Fund, effectively relinquishing majority ownership of its Chinese subsidiary to a group of investors with ties to the Chinese state.

[83][84] A prevailing view emerged that the matter would negatively affect the pending approval by the Chinese regulators of the Softbank-Nvidia deal, as well as any public offering of Arm.

[70][87] In February 2022, Allen Wu, the CEO of Arm China, floated the idea of a public offering of the Chinese subsidiary in 2025.

[89] Subsequently, in 2023, key staff left to form their own chip design startup Borui Jingxin, which competes with Arm China, particularly for engineers.

[90][91] Unlike most traditional microprocessor suppliers, such as Intel, Freescale (the former semiconductor division of Motorola, now NXP Semiconductors) and Renesas (a former joint venture between Hitachi and Mitsubishi Electric), ARM only creates and licenses its technology as intellectual property (IP),[92] rather than manufacturing and selling its own physical CPUs, GPUs, SoCs or microcontrollers.

[93] A characteristic feature of Arm processors is their low electric power consumption, which makes them particularly suitable for use in portable devices.

[94] Arm processors are used as the main CPU for most mobile phones[95] many PDAs and handhelds, like the Apple iPod and iPad,[96][97] and computer games and as well as many other applications, including GPS navigation devices, digital cameras and televisions.

Processors designed by Arm or by Arm licensees are used as microcontrollers in embedded systems, including real-time safety systems (cars' ABS),[118] biometrics systems (fingerprint sensor[119]), smart TVs (e.g. Android TV), all modern smartwatches (such as Qualcomm Toq), and are used as general-purpose processors in smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops (even for running traditional x86 Microsoft Windows programs[120][121]),[122] servers[123] and supercomputers/HPC,[124][125][126][101] Systems, including iPhone smartphones, frequently include many chips, from many different providers, that include one or more licensed Arm cores, in addition to those in the main Arm-based processor.

[134] In October 2018, ARM Holdings partnered with Intel in order to share code for embedded systems through the Yocto Project.

Partners include: Analog Devices, Cypress, Maxim Integrated, Nuvoton, NXP, Renesas, Realtek, Samsung, Silicon Labs and u-blox.

[139] In October 2022 the IoT services of Pelion were purchased by Izuma Networks, an Austin, Texas based startup.

[140] On 8 October 2019, Arm announced the Autonomous Vehicle Computing Consortium (AVCC) to collaborate and accelerate development of self-driving cars.

Members include Arm, Bosch, Continental, Denso, General Motors, Nvidia, NXP and Toyota.

In the 2011 financial year, East received a total compensation of £1,187,500 from ARM, comprising a salary of £475,000 and a bonus of £712,500.

Chambers, a non-executive director of Tesco and former chief executive of Nippon Sheet Glass Group, had previously worked at Mars and Royal Dutch Shell.