Arm

Arm was founded in Cambridge, England, in 1990 as a joint venture of Acorn Computers, Apple and VLSI Technology. SoftBank bought it in 2016 and remains its majority shareholder, and since 2023 it has been listed on Nasdaq. Its global headquarters is still in Cambridge.

It designs processor architectures and licenses them to chipmakers: the Cortex CPUs for phones, embedded devices and cars, Neoverse for servers and cloud, Mali GPUs and Ethos NPUs, as well as ready-made compute subsystems. Almost every smartphone runs on an Arm-based chip. In 2026 it launched the Arm AGI CPU, a data-centre processor developed with Meta and the first chip Arm sells itself.

According to its annual report for the fiscal year to 31 March 2026, Arm had 9,584 full-time employees, 84% of them in engineering: 3,943 in the UK, 2,023 in the US and 1,829 in India. Its engineering sites include Cambridge, Manchester, Sheffield and Bristol in the UK, San Jose, Austin and Chandler in the US, Bengaluru and Noida, Sophia Antipolis, Lund, Trondheim, Budapest and Hsinchu.