Arm (Arm Holdings)

Arm (Arm Holdings plc) is a company headquartered in Cambridge, England, that licenses CPU instruction sets and designs. Its annual report on Form 20-F records that the operating company, Arm Limited, was incorporated as Widelogic Limited on 12 November 1990, renamed Advanced RISC Machines Limited on 3 December 1990 and renamed Arm Limited on 21 May 1998. It began as a joint venture of Acorn Computers, Apple Computer and VLSI Technology, and its prehistory goes back to the ARM1 that Acorn had running in 1985. It had 9,584 employees at the end of March 2026, about 84% of them in engineering. Rene Haas has been CEO since February 2022.

Selling designs, not chips

Arm itself neither makes nor sells chips. It licenses its instruction set, CPU cores and other designs to chip companies, device makers and cloud providers, and earns two kinds of revenue.

Customers can use Arm-designed CPU cores as they are, or take a licence to the instruction set alone and design their own CPUs; the 20-F lists growth in the latter as a risk that could reduce the fees Arm collects. Apple's M1 is an in-house Arm-based SoC, and the Raspberry Pi 3 and Pi 5 use Arm Cortex cores. The difference from x86 is in the glossary.

According to the 20-F, more than 350 billion Arm-based chips had been reported as shipped cumulatively by the end of March 2026. Arm says it has held more than 99% of the mobile applications processor market for many years; that market provided about 43% of royalty revenue. In PCs, Windows RT and the Copilot+ PC were attempts at Windows on Arm.

A succession of owners

The deal as seen from NVIDIA's side is in the entry on NVIDIA.

Key events

• 12 November 1990: Incorporated as Widelogic Limited; renamed Advanced RISC Machines Limited on 3 December.
• 1998: Listed in London and on Nasdaq; renamed Arm Limited on 21 May.
• 5 September 2016: Acquired by SoftBank Group.
• February 2022: The sale to NVIDIA is abandoned; Rene Haas becomes CEO.
• 31 August 2022: Sues Qualcomm and Nuvia.
• 14 September 2023: Returns to Nasdaq.
• 26 August 2025: Completes the sale of the Artisan foundation IP business.
• March 2026: Announces the Arm AGI CPU, its own production silicon product.

Key figures

Fiscal year ended 31 March 2026 (April 2025 to March 2026), US GAAP, from the 20-F.

• Revenue: US$4.92 billion (up 23%), of which US$1.50 billion came from related parties (US$0.82 billion the year before)
• Operating income: US$0.90 billion / net income: US$0.90 billion
• R&D: US$2.78 billion (56% of revenue)
• The top five customers, including Arm China and SoftBank Group, accounted for about 57% of revenue; the PRC for about 18%

Can it stay a neutral designer?

Arm's strength is that it competes with none of the rival chip companies and can sell the same designs to all of them. That premise is being tested from several directions.

The first is its relationship with customers. In August 2022 Arm sued Qualcomm over the licence of Nuvia, which Qualcomm had acquired; the jury verdict of December 2024 and the final judgment of September 2025 both favoured Qualcomm, and Arm has appealed. The 20-F says Qualcomm is a major customer that accounted for 9% of Arm's revenue; the litigation itself is covered in the entry on Qualcomm.

The second is the step towards making chips itself. According to the 20-F, Arm announced the Arm AGI CPU as a production silicon product in March 2026 and is also developing chiplets and complete chip solutions. The same filing lists among its risks that such products may create real or perceived conflicts with companies important to its business. When a company that sells designs also sells chips, it becomes both a supplier and a competitor to its customers.

The third is China. Arm earns substantially all of its PRC-related revenue through its licence agreement with Arm China, yet the 20-F states that neither Arm nor SoftBank Group controls Arm China's operations. It also lists US and Chinese export and investment controls as factors that could restrict business with Chinese customers.