ACQ2: How ARM Became The World’s Default Chip Architecture (with ARM CEO Rene Haas)

ARM CEO Rene Haas explains how a low-power chip designed for the Apple Newton became the dominant architecture in AI, data centers, and nearly every device on earth.

• ARM shipped ~29 billion chips in FY2024 — roughly 4 chips per human on earth, dwarfing the ~200M-unit global laptop market.
• Nvidia tried to acquire ARM in 2020 for $40B; regulators blocked it on long-term competition grounds, not near-term market overlap.
• SoftBank bought ARM in 2016 for $32B and sold to Nvidia four years later at the same price — a deal now viewed as dramatically undervalued given ARM’s ~$150B public market cap.
• IBM’s 1981 decision to build the PC on Intel x86 rather than in-house — and not license the architecture — locked CISK in for the PC era and nearly killed RISC commercially.
• Apple’s iPhone was nearly built on Intel Atom; the iPod team’s ARM-based iOS proposal won internally, making ARM the de facto smartphone standard from 2007 onward.
• ARM forbids licensees from adding custom instructions to preserve ISA compatibility — breaking it would collapse the software ecosystem that is ARM’s core moat.
• Hyperscalers (AWS, Google, Microsoft) report ~60% performance-per-dollar gains on custom ARM SOCs versus x86, driven by full-stack co-design freedom ARM enables and x86 cannot.

2025-04-03 · Watch on YouTube