Arm Limited (NASDAQ: ARM) is a global semiconductor IP company best known for designing energy-efficient processor architectures and related technologies that underpin a wide range of computing devices. Founded in 1990 as a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple and VLSI Technology and headquartered in Cambridge, England, Arm develops the ARM instruction set architectures and core processor designs that chipmakers license and integrate into custom system-on-chip (SoC) products. The company operates a licensing and royalty business model rather than manufacturing chips itself.
Arm’s product portfolio includes CPU core families (such as Cortex and Neoverse lines), GPU and multimedia IP (Mali), neural processing units (Ethos) and a suite of system and physical IP blocks. It also provides software tools, reference designs, development platforms and ecosystem support to help customers implement and optimize Arm-based designs. Arm architectures are widely used across mobile devices, embedded systems, IoT, automotive applications, networking and increasingly in servers and cloud infrastructure due to their focus on power-efficient performance.
Arm serves a global customer base of semiconductor companies and device manufacturers through offices and partner relationships around the world. The company was acquired by SoftBank Group in 2016 and subsequently returned to the public markets in 2023 via an initial public offering on the Nasdaq; SoftBank remained a significant shareholder following that offering. Arm’s executive leadership in recent years has emphasized expanding its footprint beyond mobile into data center, automotive and edge computing markets while nurturing a broad partner ecosystem that supports hardware and software innovation around Arm architectures.