Arm’s future looks bright. Last year it became the UK’s first $100bn tech company and now has a market cap of around $150bn, while turnover is on course to hit around $4bn by the end of the current financial year in April.
The Cambridge-based chip designer, whose architecture can be found in almost all the world’s smartphones, will also be in no short supply of future business. It is making progress on developing semiconductor architecture for use in data centres, opening a potentially huge market amid massive demand for compute by AI businesses.
In an interview with UKTN, Richard Grisenthwaite, the firm’s chief architect and de facto CTO said that owing to this demand, he could “definitely see [Arm] going way above our current valuation.”
But Arm’s opportunities for growth go beyond just data centres.
“Automotive is undergoing a huge computing revolution, and again, a lot of the technologies that we’re seeing work in data centres, will actually transfer quite nicely to autonomous drive”, said Grisenthwaite.
“Higher and higher levels of autonomy will need an immense amount of compute power, and that’s going to provide a tremendous opportunity for us. It’s got the same hallmarks”.
Grisenthwaite said the 34-year-old firm’s secret to success lies in “wanting to work with everyone and in partnership for a win-win.”
“When we started out, we were so small and we knew we couldn’t do everything, so we concentrated on our bit and let other people do their bit. And I think that business model really helped cement a lot of relationships with a lot of companies.”
But with a bout of economic protectionism on the horizon as Donald Trump returns to the White House later this month and the prospect of increasingly aggressive trade wars, Arm may meet challenges from foreign and economic policy across the world.
However, Grisenthwaite believes there is a place for the firm to cooperate with national governments.
He says this was already the case in 2022. When the Biden administration planned to curb exports of high-performance AI chips to China, Arm successfully advised the government to adjust the way the policy was implemented.
“The way they worded those original rules created a whole bunch of effects on much more ordinary sort of commercial servers, which actually wasn’t the goal in the slightest from the US point of view”, he says.
“We spent quite a lot of time talking with officials to help them refine the rules. And a year later, they came out with rules which [were] actually much better targeted and avoided the collateral damage to other things.”
Grisenthwaite, who sits on the UK’s Semiconductor Advisory Panel, says Arm has similar relationships with other national governments around the world.
While he rejects the idea that the firm should try to change government policy, he contends that it “just want[s] to make sure that government policy is actually done sensibly and doesn’t have unexpected effects”.
Providing this advice to governments is one way that Arm can navigate the increasing tumult of international trade.
Another way is to use mechanisms such as time sheets, which track the number of labour hours spent in each country, to inform export controls. Arm’s status as a global firm helps this, argues Grisenthwaite.
“[As a global company] we can do design in particular places in order to make sure that we’re following the export rules completely.”
“But equally, exploiting differences where they exist is a perfectly sensible thing to do.”
Read more: How Arm became Britain’s most successful tech company
Grisenthwaite attended the University of Cambridge and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in engineering in 1989. He worked for Analog Devices and Inmos, both in the semiconductor industry, before joining Arm in 1997 where he worked on the Arm7, 9, and 11.
Beginning with the Armv6, Grisenthwaite has led the development of the Arm architecture since 2003, being responsible for its long-term evolution. He now serves as the firm’s Executive Vice President and Chief Architect.
Arm was founded in 1990 in a partnership between Cambridge-based Acorn Computers and tech giant Apple.
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