The European Factor: From ARM to Atos

Reports on ARM, a 30-year-old U.K.-based semiconductor Intellectual Property (IP) company that started as Advanced RISC Machines Ltd., a joint venture that included former U.K. company Acorn Computers, Apple Computers (now Apple Inc.),1 and VLSI Technology (a US company later bought by Phillips for USD 1 billion and now part of the Philips spin-off NXP Semiconductors). ARM was bought in 2016 by the Japanese conglomerate and investing company Softbank Group, which also has a main stake in US Sprint and also has significant T-Mobile stock via the merger of Sprint and T-Mobile that was completed in April 2020. In September 2020, NVIDIA announced that it is buying ARM,2 but it may take time to complete since it is running into some licensing issues regarding its subsidiary ARM-China. Unlike Intel, AMD, and Freescale, ARM does not produce any computer chips, but licenses its architecture designs and product ecosystem to other vendors.