A room in Cambridge, a government project, and a woman

The story of ARM does not begin in a Silicon Valley garage. It begins in Cambridge, in 1983, in a small company called Acorn Computers, on a commission from the BBC.

The context matters, because it changes the whole flavour of the story. The British government had decided to launch a national computer literacy programme — the BBC Computer Literacy Project — and needed a machine that could go into schools. Acorn won the tender with the BBC Micro, a cheap and robust computer that would introduce an entire generation of Britons to programming. It was the first time a state systematically funded popular access to computing. Not a startup with a venture-capital pitch: a public project, with public money, for an explicitly democratising goal.

But the BBC Micro was not enough. Acorn needed something more powerful for the next step, and the processors available on the market — 6502, Z80, the early Intel offerings — were either too slow, too complex, or too expensive. Acorn's research and development team then decided to design one from scratch, drawing inspiration from Patterson and Ditzel's work at Berkeley on the RISC architecture: simple instructions, executed quickly, few transistors, low power consumption. The result, in 1985, was the ARM1: thirty thousand transistors, no cache, no microcode.

The person who designed the architecture and instruction set of that ARM1 was called Sophie Wilson. Her approach is summarised in a sentence she gave in an interview with the Telegraph, and it is worth quoting:

We accomplished this by thinking about things very, very carefully beforehand.

Nothing particularly sophisticated, on the face of it. But in a sector where the dominant tendency was to add instructions and complexity to increase performance, the intuition of Wilson and her colleague Steve Furber went in the opposite direction: take away instead of add, simplify instead of complicate.

There is an episode that explains better than any technical analysis where this philosophy led. On 26 April 1985, when the first chips came back from the VLSI Technology foundry, Furber connected them to a development board and was puzzled: the ammeter in series with the power supply read zero. The processor seemed to be consuming literally nothing. The team that had designed the ARM1 numbered a handful of people — Wilson on the instruction set, Furber on microarchitecture design, a few collaborators around them — and operated with negligible resources compared to Intel or Motorola. The idea that they had just produced a processor that consumed zero was implausible.

The explanation, as Wilson recounted in a 2012 interview with The Register, was wrong in the most embarrassing way possible:

The development board the chip was plugged into had a fault: there was no current being sent down the power supply lines at all. The processor was actually running on leakage from the logic circuits. So the low-power big thing that the ARM is most valued for today, the reason that it's on all your mobile phones, was a complete accident.

The board was faulty, the power was not actually reaching the chip, and the processor was running on the leakage current from the logic circuits. The most important characteristic of the most widespread ARM architecture on the planet — the energy efficiency that makes it suitable for mobile devices — was discovered by mistake, on a broken board, by an engineer convinced he had a faulty measuring instrument.

Furber, for his part, explained the dynamic in more engineering terms:

We applied Victorian engineering margins, and in designing to ensure it came out under a watt, we missed, and it came out under a tenth of a watt.

The “Victorian engineering margins” are the generous safety margins typical of late nineteenth-century engineering — over-dimensioning every component to avoid failures. Furber and Wilson, accustomed to designing with limited resources and no margin for error, had applied the same principle to the chip design: design for consumption under a watt, and end up well below.

There was no magic with the low power characteristics apart from simplicity.

No magic. Just a design done well by a small team that could not afford to get it wrong. On that accident, and on that simplicity, ARM's dominance in mobile for the next forty years would be built.

A note on Sophie Wilson

Born in Leeds in 1957. She studied mathematics at Selwyn College, Cambridge, and as a student already worked with Hermann Hauser at Acorn — designing the Acorn System 1 even before graduating. In 1981, on commission from the BBC, she wrote BBC BASIC: a complete programming language in 16 kilobytes, so well-designed that it is still in use today on embedded systems. The “subtract instead of add” philosophy that would make ARM1 what it is was not born in 1985: it was born in the extreme memory constraints of the BBC Micro. Only later, in 1983, did Wilson begin work on the ARM1 instruction set, which she completed with Steve Furber in 1985. After Acorn she moved to Element 14, a 1999 spin-off absorbed by Broadcom in 2000. At Broadcom, where she still works as a Distinguished Engineer, she contributed to the BCM family of SoCs — including those that ended up inside the early Raspberry Pis, BCM2837 of the Pi 3 included. Recognition came late: Computer History Museum Fellow Award in 2012, Fellow of the Royal Society in 2013, Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2019. In the 1990s she completed her gender transition, continuing to work in the sector without interruption.

In 1990, Acorn, Apple and VLSI Technology founded a separate joint venture to manage and license the architecture. The name changed from Acorn RISC Machine to Advanced RISC Machines. ARM Holdings was born as an independent company, headquartered in Cambridge, with a business model that had no precedent in the sector: it would never manufacture a single chip. It would sell the idea of the chip. Licences, royalties, IP. Anyone who wanted to build an ARM processor would have to pay them.

It was a technical choice, but also a political one. ARM did not have the capital to build factories, did not have the infrastructure. But it had something harder to replicate: a clean, efficient architecture, designed well from the start.

The architecture of invisible power

ARM's business model is one of the most elegant — and least understood — in the entire technology industry. It works like this: ARM designs the processor architectures and licenses their use to third parties in exchange for an upfront fee (typically between one and ten million dollars) plus a royalty on every chip produced, usually around 1–2% of the final device price. Whoever buys the licence can then build their own chips based on that architecture, customising it within the limits allowed by the contract. They are not buying a product, then: they are buying the right to make one.

Garnsey, Lorenzoni and Ferriani, in a fundamental study on the birth of ARM as a spin-off from Acorn published in Research Policy in 2008, describe this transition as an exemplary case of techno-organizational speciation: technology is not simply transferred, but is radically transformed in the passage to a new domain through a new organisational model. ARM is not Acorn that changes its name: it is a new organism, with a completely different survival logic, which carries the original DNA but adapts to an environment Acorn could never have inhabited.

The practical result of this structure is what the industry calls neutral positioning. ARM does not compete with its customers — it does not sell chips, does not produce devices — so it can sell the same licence to Qualcomm, Apple, Samsung and MediaTek, who fight each other on the market every day. It is the “Switzerland” of silicon: a credible referee, a common infrastructure, a layer everyone builds on without having to trust the others. This has created an ecosystem of over a thousand licensee partners — a number impossible to reach for any traditional chip manufacturer. Furber, today professor of computer engineering at the University of Manchester, summed up the result in a way that is hard to forget:

I suspect there's more ARM computing power on the planet than everything else ever made put together. The numbers are just astronomical.

It is not rhetoric: it is the logical consequence of a model that multiplies adoption instead of concentrating it.

But this neutrality has a structural cost that is rarely thematised. When ARM sells a licence, it also sells dependence. Whoever builds their own SoC on ARM architecture is bound to that instruction set for the entire life of the product. Changing architecture would mean rewriting the software, recertifying the systems, redoing the chip design. The exit cost is very high. And this means that ARM, despite producing nothing, exercises enormous systemic power: it can renegotiate licence terms, raise royalties, decide who gets access to the most advanced architectures and who does not. Abstract as this dependence may sound on paper, there is a recent case that makes it very concrete — and worth following in detail, because it illustrates exactly how ARM power is exercised in the real world.

In 2021, Qualcomm acquired for $1.4 billion a Californian startup called Nuvia, founded by three former Apple Silicon engineers — Gerard Williams III, Manu Gulati, John Bruno — who were designing a server chip called Phoenix, based on the ARM v8.7-A architecture. Nuvia had its own ALA (Architecture License Agreement) with ARM, negotiated on the terms of a small startup entering a new market. When Qualcomm bought it, it integrated the Phoenix technology into its own Oryon core, the heart of the new Snapdragon X Elite — the chip with which Qualcomm wanted to challenge Intel and AMD in the AI PC laptop market.

The problem was contractual, not technical. Qualcomm's ALA with ARM already existed, and provided for lower royalties than Nuvia's. Qualcomm argued that the integration of Nuvia into its own chips fell under its pre-existing ALA. ARM replied that no: the acquisition required a full renegotiation from scratch — on ARM's terms, naturally. In 2022 ARM took Qualcomm to court asking, among other things, for the physical destruction of the pre-acquisition Nuvia designs. Not a downsizing, not a renegotiation: destruction. The message was unambiguous: IP licensing is not a sale, it is a revocable permission, and the permission is granted by whoever owns the architecture.

The case went to trial in Wilmington, Delaware, in December 2024. The jury ruled unanimously in favour of Qualcomm on two of the three contested points, hung jury on the third. On 30 September 2025, Judge Maryellen Noreika issued the final ruling: full and final judgment in favour of Qualcomm and Nuvia on all fronts, also rejecting ARM's request for a new trial. The judge explicitly noted that ARM itself, in its own internal documents, admitted to having recorded historic licensing and royalty revenues after attempting to terminate Nuvia's ALA in 2022 — which, translated, means: while claiming to have been damaged by Nuvia's actions, ARM was making piles of money precisely thanks to the ecosystem built on that architecture.

ARM has announced it will appeal. Qualcomm, for its part, already has a counter-suit open since April 2024 against ARM — accusing it of withholding technical deliverables, anti-competitive behaviour, and (in a subsequent amendment) of intending to enter the server chip market as a direct competitor. The trial, originally set for March 2026, has been postponed to October 2026 to deal with a series of pending motions — a sign that the complexity of the dispute does not exhaust itself easily. That is: ARM, which built everything on neutral positioning, finds itself accused in court of wanting to become a silicon producer. Aka: the Switzerland that suddenly wants an army.

The Qualcomm/Nuvia case is important not because Qualcomm won, but because it publicly exposed the nature of the power ARM exercises. The real asset had never been the architecture — the architecture is technical documentation, brutally, in the end. The real asset was the contract. The capacity to drag into court anyone who thinks they can use that documentation without the right permission. Langdon Winner, in his influential 1980 essay Do Artifacts Have Politics?, argued that technological choices are never neutral — they incorporate power structures, distribute access in non-random ways, create dependencies that persist long after the initial decision.

It is still true that, in a world in which human beings make and maintain artificial systems, nothing is “required” in an absolute sense. Nevertheless, once a course of action is underway, once artifacts like nuclear power plants have been built and put in operation, the kinds of reasoning that justify the adaptation of social life to technical requirements pop up as spontaneously as flowers in the spring.

And ARM is an almost perfect case of this thesis applied to the IP economy: an architecture born of a public computer-literacy project becomes the foundation on which an invisible monopoly is built across tens of billions of devices. It is not malice. It is structure. The chip has no intentions. But the licensing structure that sits on top of it, that one does.

A new front: the datacentre

A parenthesis is necessary, because it tells where ARM is going right now — and why the Qualcomm/Nuvia case has the importance it has.

For the first part of its history, ARM was the architecture of mobile. Servers, datacentres, enterprise computing were Intel territory: x86 dominated in an apparently unchallenged way. Things began to change in 2018, when Amazon Web Services announced the first Graviton, a custom ARM chip designed in-house by Annapurna Labs (acquired by AWS in 2015). The selling argument was simple and technically sound: at equivalent loads, ARM chips consumed much less energy than equivalent x86, and in a datacentre where the electricity bill is a third of operating costs, this translates directly into margin.

Since then the trajectory has been steady and surprisingly fast. In 2023 ARM accounted for about 5% of the cloud compute of the three major hyperscalers. ARM itself, in its 2025 communications, claims that by year-end approximately half of the compute shipped to the top hyperscalers will be ARM-based — a figure to be taken with the caution due to a company talking about its own market, but consistent: for the third consecutive year, more than half of new CPU capacity added to AWS is Graviton, and 98% of the top one thousand EC2 customers use it. AWS Graviton5, announced on 4 December 2025 at re:Invent, has 192 cores in a single socket, an L3 cache five times larger than the previous generation, and is based on the Neoverse V3 ARMv9.2 cores at 3 nanometres. Google has launched Axion (based on Neoverse V2) with the claim of a 65% better price-performance compared to x86 instances. Microsoft has rolled out Cobalt 100 in 29 global regions. NVIDIA — the very same NVIDIA that had tried to buy ARM — uses ARM Neoverse cores in Grace, the CPU that accompanies its H100 and B100 GPUs for AI workloads. Spotify, Paramount+, Uber, Oracle, Salesforce have migrated infrastructure to ARM. Over a billion ARM Neoverse cores have been deployed in datacentres worldwide.

This changes the proportions of the game. When ARM made money on smartphone royalties, we were talking about cents per chip but on billions of units. In datacentres things are different: every Graviton5 costs AWS thousands of dollars, and every server with an ARM chip on board is a more substantial royalty. The datacentre is the segment where ARM can finally start extracting value aggressively. And it is also the segment where licensees have most to lose: if Apple or Qualcomm raise your royalties on a phone, it is an annoyance; if ARM raises your royalties on the chip running your cloud, it is an attack on the operating margin of your business.

It is easier to understand, in this light, why Qualcomm pulled out the Nuvia case with such determination. And why — as we will see shortly — it is looking for an architectural way out.

The failed coup

November 2020. Jensen Huang, NVIDIA's CEO, announces the acquisition of ARM from SoftBank for $40 billion. It would have been the largest operation in semiconductor history. It did not go through, and understanding why helps to see how systemic ARM's position in the industry was — and still is.

Hermann Hauser, the Austrian from Cambridge who had founded Acorn, the company from which ARM was born, had reacted to the SoftBank acquisition back in July 2016 with a public statement on Twitter that left no room for interpretation:

ARM is the proudest achievement of my life. The proposed sale to SoftBank is a sad day for me and for technology in Britain.

When, four years later, NVIDIA announced its intention to buy ARM from SoftBank, Hauser's reaction was even sharper. In an interview with the BBC he explained the structural problem with a clarity that regulatory documents rarely achieve:

It's one of the fundamental assumptions of the ARM business model that it can sell to everybody. The one saving grace about Softbank was that it wasn't a chip company, and retained ARM neutrality. If it becomes part of Nvidia, most of the licensees are competitors of Nvidia, and will of course then look for an alternative to ARM.

And in his written testimony submitted to the British Parliament he added, with the freedom of someone who had nothing left to lose:

I have no shares or other interest in ARM as I had to sell them all to Softbank. I can therefore freely speak my mind.

Hauser was right. NVIDIA, in 2020, was already dominant in artificial intelligence through its GPUs. Buying ARM would have meant getting early access to new designs ahead of competitors, the ability to slow or deny licences to rivals, and benefiting freely from the architecture while others continued paying royalties. Qualcomm, Microsoft and Google publicly opposed the deal. The American FTC opened an antitrust proceeding. The European Commission launched an investigation. Britain opened its own. China raised a red flag. In February 2022, the deal was formally cancelled for significant regulatory challenges.

There is another Hauser statement worth quoting. In a 2022 interview with UKTN, he called British politicians «technologically illiterate» and «the root cause» of the governance problems around ARM. He argued that the government should have taken a golden share in ARM long before, and that any attempt to do so in 2022 was «trying to close the gate after the horse has bolted». An architecture born with public money and a public mandate had become a pawn in the power game between SoftBank, NVIDIA and the NASDAQ — because no one had thought, at the appropriate moment, that it was worth keeping it in public territory.

The end of the story: SoftBank took ARM public in September 2023, in what was the largest IPO of the year. ARM Holdings is today listed on NASDAQ with a market capitalisation of around $150 billion. Masayoshi Son is still the controlling shareholder. The fact that the acquisition attempt by the world's largest AI chip producer was blocked by regulators does not eliminate the problem — it shifts it. ARM is independent, but it is a very particular form of independence: that of a systemic infrastructure in the hands of financial investors, subject to stock-market logic, obliged to grow revenues every quarter. The uncomfortable question is: what happens when the needs of a commons architecture — stable, predictable, accessible, neutral — conflict with the needs of a publicly listed company that has to raise royalties to satisfy shareholders? It is not a theoretical question. ARM has systematically increased its licence fees in recent years. And the major licensees have started looking for alternatives.

The half-democratisation

We have to give ARM what ARM deserves, before continuing with the critique. And what it deserves is considerable.

The Raspberry Pi — version 3 in 2017, version 5 today — costs less than eighty euros for the most recent version. It is a complete computer, capable of running Linux, a server, a media centre, a network node. It exists because the ARM architecture has made it possible to produce powerful and very low-power SoCs at costs that x86 processors cannot get close to. The same principle applies to the billion-plus smartphones in the hands of people in countries where a desktop PC would be an inaccessible luxury. To the microcontrollers controlling IoT sensors at a few cents each. To the embedded processors in medical devices, industrial control systems, critical infrastructure. ARM has materially lowered the cost of access to computational hardware on a global scale.

Wilson herself, looking back on the whole story, framed it with a lucidity that almost sounds like a warning:

To build something new and complicated, it's not the sort of quick thing, it's a sustained effort over a long period of time. It takes many people's different inputs to make something unique and novel. Overnight success takes 30 years.

Thirty years of invisible work, of architectures refined chip by chip, of licences negotiated one at a time, before the world noticed that ARM was everywhere.

The “democratisation” effected by ARM is real but structurally asymmetric. It has democratised access to hardware for device manufacturers — anyone can build an ARM chip by paying the licence — but not necessarily for the end users of those devices. An iPhone — or an Android phone — has an ARM chip designed by a company, but the end user has no access to the chip's architecture, no possibility to modify it, no transparency on what runs at that level. The chip is ARM, the device is a closed box. This is the final contradiction: you may have the right — or almost — to manage the software running on an ARM chip, but below the kernel, below the bootloader, there is a chip whose architecture was defined in Cambridge, produced in Taiwan, integrated into a SoC designed by Broadcom, over which you can have no control. Sovereignty ends exactly where silicon begins. Those who really benefited are the oligopoly of large licensees — Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung, NVIDIA, Amazon with its Gravitons — not the small Bangalore startup with an idea for a specialised chip.

And yet — and here the story gets complicated, in an interesting way — within the narrow space the ARM licensing model concedes, someone is nevertheless trying to pull the lever of openness at the levels available. In December 2024, a Shenzhen company called Radxa announced the Radxa Orion O6, presented as the “World's First Open Source Arm V9 Motherboard”. It is a Mini-ITX board at $200 in the base version, based on the Cix CD8180 SoC — an ARMv9.2 chip with 12 cores (four Cortex-A720 at 2.8 GHz, four at 2.4 GHz, four Cortex-A520 at 1.8 GHz) produced by Cix Technology, a Chinese fabless founded in 2021. Debian 12, Fedora and Ubuntu run natively on it, with UEFI EDKII and SystemReady SR certification. The first Geekbench benchmarks put it at the level of an Apple M1 in single-core — not bad for an ARM board at less than a tenth of the price of a Mac mini.

*Note: it is worth clarifying what “open source” means here, because it means different things at different levels. The ARMv9.2 instruction set on which the CD8180 is built is not open: Cix pays regular royalties to ARM Holdings like all other licensees. The SoC itself is not open: it is a proprietary chip, with the NPU microcode and Mali GPU blocks all closed. What is open is the layer immediately above: board schematics, Board Support Package, EDKII bootloader, Linux kernel, device tree — all published under free licences, replicable, modifiable.*

It is also a concrete demonstration of what the open hardware movement has been arguing for twenty years: openness is layered, and opening one more layer than was open before is already a political act, even if the foundation underneath remains closed. The fact that this board comes from China — like the RISC-V pivot we will discuss shortly — is no accident: it is consistent with a geopolitical trajectory that seeks margins of technological sovereignty wherever it is possible to extract them.

The Linux moment for hardware

And here RISC-V comes onstage. And the story gets more interesting.

RISC-V was born in 2010 at the University of California Berkeley, in the same department that had helped inspire the original RISC architecture thirty years earlier. Krste Asanović and his collaborators needed a clean processor architecture for research, without having to pay licences or ask permission. They decided to design one from scratch, and to make it completely open: no royalties, no licences, no intellectual property to respect. The RISC-V instruction set is an open standard, freely published, that anyone can implement, modify, distribute.

For ten years RISC-V was an academic experiment, then a nucleus of embedded adoption, then an interesting alternative for those who wanted custom chips without paying ARM. In the last two or three years the proportions have changed. The SHD Group, a market analysis firm that has been monitoring the RISC-V sector since 2019, announced at the November 2025 RISC-V Summit that the technology's market penetration had exceeded 25% — an important symbolic threshold, even if it is to be taken with some caution. The same RISC-V International annual report for 2025 admits it is not entirely clear whether the 25% refers to the global microprocessor market in the strict sense or only to the segments where RISC-V already has a significant presence (embedded, IoT, microcontrollers). The SHD projection for 2031 is 33.7%. However it is measured, the trajectory is that of an architecture that is no longer a niche: it is the third pillar of computing, alongside x86 and ARM.

The strength of RISC-V is not just technical — it is political in the most precise sense of the term. Some examples:

The Chinese front. China has very concrete reasons not to want to depend on ARM, a company listed in New York with American shareholders. Under increasingly stringent US sanctions on advanced Intel/AMD chips, China has pivoted en masse to RISC-V — also because the RISC-V International consortium was strategically moved from Delaware to Switzerland in March 2020, formally placing it beyond the reach of unilateral American export controls. Alibaba, through its T-Head division, has released the XuanTie C920 chips and successors. Smaller Chinese manufacturers are flooding the mid-market with RISC-V AI accelerators that cost significantly less than the equivalent Western ones under sanction. It is an architectural decoupling, not just a commercial one.

The European front. The European Union, through the EU Chips Act, funds the Project DARE consortium (Digital Autonomy with RISC-V in Europe) with the explicit goal of reducing European dependence on American and British technology in critical infrastructure. Quintauris, a joint venture founded in December 2023 by Bosch, Infineon, Nordic Semiconductor, NXP and Qualcomm (with STMicroelectronics joining as a sixth shareholder in 2024), developed in 2025 RT-Europa, the first RISC-V platform for real-time automotive controllers — a sector where dependence on foreign IP had become strategically intolerable.

The Qualcomm front. In December 2025, while the Nuvia case closed yet another chapter against ARM, Qualcomm acquired Ventana Micro Systems, one of the most advanced companies in the development of high-performance RISC-V cores. Literally: not only was Qualcomm fighting ARM in court, it was also buying the way to no longer need ARM. It is the most significant move in all the recent history, because for the first time one of the major ARM licensees equips itself with a credible architectural plan B.

Three different fronts, one same direction. The parallel with Linux is more than metaphorical. Linux did not kill Windows or macOS. But it did create a real alternative that changed the terms of power in the software industry. RISC-V aspires to do the same thing for hardware. And the critical point — the one Winner would have appreciated — is that this openness is built into the architecture itself, not guaranteed by a company's good will. You cannot buy RISC-V and “close it”. The instruction set is public by definition. You can build proprietary implementations on top of it — and many companies are doing that — but the foundation remains accessible.

And here the question: will RISC-V be incorporated by capitalism exactly as Linux was? The honest answer is: probably yes, and in part it already has been. The major RISC-V implementations by Apple, Google and Meta are not open source — they use the open instruction set to build proprietary architectures. The fact that the foundation is free does not mean that everything built on top of it is. The same logic Boltanski and Chiapello described applies: critique is not defeated, it is incorporated. But at least the foundation remains open. And that counts.

Conclusions — or questions, if you prefer

ARM is born of a public mandate and a democratisation project, and becomes the foundation of a private oligopoly. The chip is the same; the power structure on top of it is radically different from the one that produced it. And that chip really did lower the entry barriers for hardware producers — it produced the Raspberry Pi, the cheap phones, the microcontrollers everywhere, the more efficient datacentres — but the democratisation stopped at the gates of the production chain. The end users of those devices gained no real sovereignty over the silicon they hold in their pocket.

NVIDIA's attempt to acquire ARM was blocked by regulators, but only because it would have concentrated power too visibly. The systemic power ARM already exercises — silently, through licences and royalties, through legal cases against those trying to step out of contractual terms — disturbs no regulator, generates no headlines, produces no parliamentary hearings. It is the kind of power that makes itself invisible precisely because it is structural: it does not lie in a decision, it lies in the conditions within which decisions are made.

There is also a contradiction that concerns me personally. That Raspberry Pi I had on the table — and all the ARM chips in the phones I have hacked for years — were already, in some sense, part of a system I did not control. I changed the software on top. I did not change the power structure underneath (one could make the same argument about Intel, ça va sans dire…). Digital sovereignty ends exactly where silicon begins, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

RISC-V opens a real crack. Not a revolution — a crack. The possibility that the foundation of computing be a commons, instead of private property subject to corporate decisions and legal battles. It does not solve the problem of closed hardware, it does not solve the problem of oligopolistic foundries, it does not solve any of the contradictions described. But at least it does not aggravate them. It is the same logic of the open hardware movement, which for twenty years has been trying to apply to silicon what free software has applied to code — with more modest results, because the physical layer is structurally more hostile to the commons: if you cannot open it, you do not really own it. And in a sector where every layer of the technology stack has been systematically fenced off, keeping the foundation open is a political act, not just a technical one.

What stays with me is a feeling familiar to anyone who has spent time thinking about computing as political territory. Technological choices incorporate power structures. Power structures persist long after the original choices have been forgotten. And whoever controls the basic infrastructure — the instruction set, the architecture, the licences — controls something much more important than a company: they control the rules of the game on which everything else is built.

The question I leave open is: in whose favour were these rules written? And by what right do they continue to apply?

Sources and further reading

On the history of ARM and its origins

• Garnsey, E., Lorenzoni, G., Ferriani, S. (2008). “Speciation through entrepreneurial spin-off: The Acorn-ARM story”. Research Policy, 37(2): 210-224. doi: 10.1016/j.respol.2007.11.006. The most in-depth academic study on the origin of ARM as a spin-off from Acorn and on the genesis of its IP licensing-based business model. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048733307002363
• Patterson, D., Ditzel, D. (1980). “The Case for the Reduced Instruction Set Computer”. ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News, 8(6): 25-33. The founding paper of the RISC architecture at Berkeley, which inspired the ARM project. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/641914.641917

On the IP licensing business model

• Ferriani, S., Garnsey, E., Lorenzoni, G., Massa, L. (2015). “ARM plc and the IP Business Model”. Working Paper, Centre for Technology Management, University of Cambridge. https://www.ifm.eng.cam.ac.uk/uploads/Research/CTM/working_paper/2015-02-Ferriani-Garnsey-Lorenzoni-Massa.pdf
• Grindley, P. C., Teece, D. J. (1997). “Managing Intellectual Capital: Licensing and Cross-Licensing in Semiconductors and Electronics”. California Management Review, 39(2): 8-41.

On power in technological choices

• Winner, L. (1980). “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”. Daedalus, 109(1): 121-136. https://www.cc.gatech.edu/~beki/cs4001/Winner.pdf
• Boltanski, L., Chiapello, È. (1999). Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme. Gallimard. (English transl. The New Spirit of Capitalism, Verso, 2005). https://www.jstor.org/stable/4201214

On the Qualcomm/Nuvia case

• Paul, Weiss (2025). “Qualcomm Wins Decisive Post-Trial Victory in High-Profile Licensing Dispute Against Arm”. https://www.paulweiss.com/insights/client-news/qualcomm-wins-decisive-post-trial-victory-in-high-profile-licensing-dispute-against-arm. Press release of the law firm that represented Qualcomm, with summary of the 30 September 2025 ruling.
• The Register (2025). “Judge dismisses Arm's last legal claim against Qualcomm”. https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/01/arms_last_legal_claim_against/
• Computerworld (2025). “Arm's high-stakes licensing suit against Qualcomm ends in mistrial, but Qualcomm prevails in key areas”. https://www.computerworld.com/article/3629812/

On the NVIDIA acquisition attempt and geopolitical implications

• U.S. Federal Trade Commission (2021). Complaint in the Matter of NVIDIA Corporation and Arm Limited. https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-proceedings/2110081-nvidia-corporationarm-limited
• Hauser, H. (2020). Written evidence submitted to the UK Parliament Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee on the proposed acquisition of ARM by NVIDIA. Document BFA0018. https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/12711/pdf/
• Hauser, H. (2022). Interview with UKTN: “UK left it too late to take golden share in Arm”. https://www.uktech.news/news/government-and-policy/hermann-hauser-arm-golden-share-20220623

On Sophie Wilson, Steve Furber and the origin of ARM1

• Wilson, S. (2012). Interview with The Register: “ARM creators Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber”. https://www.theregister.com/2012/05/03/unsung_heroes_of_tech_arm_creators_sophie_wilson_and_steve_furber/. Contains Wilson's statement on low power as a complete accident.
• Furber, S. (2010). Interview with ACM Queue: “A Conversation with Steve Furber”. https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1716385. Contains the statement on Victorian engineering margins.
• Furber, S. (2011). Interview with Communications of the ACM. https://cacm.acm.org/news/an-interview-with-steve-furber/. Contains the assessment on total ARM computing power on the planet.
• Furber, S. (2017). “ARM: The architecture that conquered mobile computing”. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 375(2104). doi: 10.1098/rsta.2017.0148.
• Computer History Museum (2012). Fellow Award citation for Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber. https://computerhistory.org/chm-fellows/sophie-wilson/

On ARM in datacentres

• Arm Holdings (2025). “Half of the Compute Shipped to Top Hyperscalers in 2025 will be Arm-based”. Arm Newsroom. https://newsroom.arm.com/blog/half-of-compute-shipped-to-top-hyperscalers-in-2025-will-be-arm-based
• Arm Holdings (2025). “How Arm is redefining compute through the converged AI data center”. Arm Newsroom. https://newsroom.arm.com/blog/arm-converged-ai-data-center-aws-graviton5
• Omdia (2026). “Arm Steps Deeper into Silicon: Implications for the Semiconductor Value Chain”. https://omdia.tech.informa.com

On the democratisation of access to computing

• Benkler, Y. (2006). The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. Yale University Press. http://www.benkler.org/Benkler_Wealth_Of_Networks.pdf
• Söderberg, J. (2008). Hacking Capitalism: The Free and Open Source Software Movement. Routledge. https://downloads.gvsig.org/download/people/vagazzi/Hacking%20Capitalism.pdf

On RISC-V and architectural sovereignty

• RISC-V International (2024). RISC-V Ratified Specifications. https://riscv.org/technical/specifications/
• RISC-V International (2026). Annual Report 2025. https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/RISC-V-Annual-Report-2025.pdf. The official RISC-V International annual report, with the SHD Group estimate on market penetration (33.7% projected by 2031, 25% threshold reached in 2025 in some segments).
• Waterman, A., Asanović, K. (eds.) (2019). The RISC-V Instruction Set Manual. UC Berkeley Technical Report UCB/EECS-2019-103. https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/riscv-spec-20191213.pdf
• Asanović, K., Patterson, D. A. (2014). “Instruction Sets Should Be Free: The Case for RISC-V”. EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley, Tech. Rep. UCB/EECS-2014-146.
• Center for Security and Emerging Technology (2025). “RISC-V: What it is and Why it Matters”. https://cset.georgetown.edu/article/risc-v-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters/. On the incorporation of RISC-V International in Switzerland in March 2020 and the geopolitical implications.
• Jamestown Foundation (2025). “Examining China's Grand Strategy For RISC-V”. https://jamestown.org/program/examining-chinas-grand-strategy-for-risc-v/
• The Register (2025). “Qualcomm takes RISC on Arm alternative with Ventana buy”. https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/10/qualcomm_riscv_arm_ventana/. On the acquisition of Ventana Micro Systems by Qualcomm on 10 December 2025.
• Quintauris GmbH (2023). “Five Leading Semiconductor Industry Players Incorporate New Company, Quintauris, to Drive RISC-V Ecosystem Forward”. Press release, 22 December 2023. https://www.quintauris.com

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The funny thing – funny in the sense that it makes you laugh, but badly – is that I'm not alone. Every day, somewhere in the world, someone orders a mini PC, a Raspberry Pi, a managed Mikrotik switch, with the stated goal of taking back control of their digital life. They order it on Alibaba, pay with PayPal, wait for the courier. And they see nothing strange in any of this, because the contradiction is so structural it has become invisible. This article is an attempt to make it visible again. Without easy solutions, because I don't have any. And when have I ever…

The Promise of the Homelab

When, in 2019, I started self-hosting pretty much everything – Nextcloud (always on a Raspberry Pi, first RPi3 then RPi4), Jellyfin, Navidrome, FreshRSS, and about twenty-five other services on Proxmox LXC, each with its own isolated Docker daemon – I did it with a precise motivation: I wanted to know where my data lived, who could read it, and have the ability to switch it off myself if I ever felt like it. Not when a company decides to shut down a service, not when someone else changes the licence terms. Me. This came after a long period of reflection on myself, the work I was doing and still do, and the technological society I live in. It is an ideological choice before it is a technical one. Technology as a tool for autonomy rather than control; infrastructure as something you own instead of something that owns you. I hope no one is alarmed if I say that some of these reflections began with reading Theodore Kaczynski's Manifesto, before eventually landing, of course, on more authoritative sources.

Yes, I'm mad, but not quite that mad…

When you pay a subscription to a cloud service, the transaction does not end the moment you authorise the electronic payment. Shoshana Zuboff, in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, calls this mechanism behavioral surplus: the behavioural data extracted beyond what is needed to provide the service, then resold as predictive raw material.

Under the regime of surveillance capitalism, however, the first text does not stand alone; it trails a shadow close behind. The first text, full of promise, actually functions as the supply operation for the second text: the shadow text. Everything that we contribute to the first text, no matter how trivial or fleeting, becomes a target for surplus extraction. That surplus fills the pages of the second text. This one is hidden from our view: “read only” for surveillance capitalists. In this text our experience is dragooned as raw material to be accumulated and analyzed as means to others' market ends. The shadow text is a burgeoning accumulation of behavioral surplus and its analyses, and it says more about us than we can know about ourselves. Worse still, it becomes increasingly difficult, and perhaps impossible, to refrain from contributing to the shadow text. It automatically feeds on our experience as we engage in the normal and necessary routines of social participation.

You are not the customer of the system – you are its product. Your habits, your schedules, your preferences, your hesitations before clicking on something: all of this is collected, modelled, sold. The transaction is not monthly: it is continuous, invisible, and never ends as long as you use the service. With hardware, in principle, the transaction is one-time: you buy, you pay, it ends, it is yours. The disk is in your room, not on a server subject to government requests, security breaches, or business decisions that are nothing to do with you but impact your access to those services. This distinction – between a tool you use and a system that uses you – is the real stake of the homelab. It is not about saving money, it is not about performance. It is about who controls what.

The problem is that building this infrastructure requires hardware, time, knowledge, and resources. The hardware comes from somewhere; the time, the knowledge, and the energy resources come from a privilege not granted to everyone.

The Market I Hadn't Seen

Search for “mini PC homelab” on any marketplace. What you find is a productive ecosystem that has exploded over the past five years in a way I honestly did not expect.

MINISFORUM, Beelink, Trigkey, Geekom, GMKtec. Zimaboard, with its single-board aesthetic designed explicitly for those who want home racks. Raspberry Pi and the galaxy of clones – Orange Pi, Rock Pi, Banana Pi. Managed Mikrotik switches at accessible prices. 1U rack cases to mount under the desk. M.2 NVMe SSDs with TBW figures calculated for small-server workloads. Silent power supplies designed to run 24/7. A market built from scratch, that exists precisely because there is a community of people who want to run servers at home. r/homelab and r/selfhosted on Reddit have approximately 2.8 and 1.7 million members respectively – numbers publicly verifiable, and growing. YouTube is full of dedicated channels. There is an entire attention economy built around “escaping” the attention economy.

But it is worth asking: who built this market, and why. MINISFORUM and Beelink do not exist out of ideological sympathy for the homelab movement. They exist because they identified a profitable segment and served it with industrial precision. Kate Crawford, in Atlas of AI, documents how technology supply chains follow niche demand with the same efficiency with which they follow mass demand: factories in Guangdong optimise production lines not for a worldview, but for a margin. The fact that the resulting product also satisfies an ideological need is, from the manufacturer's point of view, irrelevant.

The Victorian environmental disaster at the dawn of the global information society shows how the relations between technology and its materials, environments, and labor practices are interwoven. Just as Victorians precipitated ecological disaster for their early cables, so do contemporary mining and global supply chains further imperil the delicate ecological balance of our era.

The mechanism had been described with theoretical precision back in 1999 by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello in The New Spirit of Capitalism. Their thesis: capitalism is never defeated by criticism – it is incorporated. When a critique becomes widespread enough, the system absorbs it and transforms it into a market segment. The artistic critique of the 1960s – autonomy, authenticity, rejection of standardisation – became the marketing of the creative economy. The critique of digital centralisation – sovereignty, privacy, control – has become an online catalogue to browse through.

Resistance has become a market segment. Every time someone buys a HUNSN to stop paying subscriptions to services they don't control, a factory in Guangdong sells a HUNSN. Capitalism has not been defeated – it has shifted (at least for a small slice of the population: the nerds, the hackers) the extraction point from subscriptions to hardware.

The Accumulation Syndrome

But there is a further level – more ridiculous and more personal – that homelab communities never discuss openly, yet anyone who has a homelab recognises immediately. The Raspberry Pi 4 bought “for a project.” The old ThinkPad kept because “you never know.” The 4TB disk salvaged from a decommissioned NAS – and “it might come in handy.” The second-hand switch picked up on eBay for eighteen euros because it was cheap and might be useful. The cables, the cables, the cables.

r/homelab has a term for this: just in case hardware. It is the hardware of the imaginary future, of projects that only exist in your head, of configurations that one day – one day – you will finally test. In the meantime it occupies a shelf, draws current in standby, and generates a diffuse sense of possibility that is indistinguishable from the most classic consumerism. The underlying psychological mechanism has a precise name: compensatory consumption – consumption as a response to a perceived loss of autonomy or control. You buy hardware because buying hardware gives you the feeling of recovering agency over something. The aesthetic is different from traditional consumerism – no luxury logos, no recognisable status symbols – but the mechanism is identical.

That said, there is a partially honest answer to all of this: the second-hand and refurbished market. The ThinkPad X230 on eBay, the Dell R720 server decommissioned from a datacentre, the disk from someone who upgraded their NAS. My ZFS NAS, to give one example, is a recycled old tower with four 1TB disks in RAIDZ – hardware that would otherwise have ended up in landfill, with a life cycle extended by years, without generating new production demand. It is closer to the ethics of repair than to compulsive buying. But it has its own internal contradiction: it requires even more technical competence than buying new – knowing how to assess wear, diagnose an unknown component, manage ten-year-old drivers. The barrier to entry rises further. And the refurbished market is itself now an organised commercial sector, with its own margins, its own platforms, its own pricing logic. It is not a clean way out. It is a less dirty way out.

And then there is the energy question, which is usually ignored in homelab discussions and is instead the most uncomfortable of all – uncomfortable enough to deserve a more in-depth treatment later on. For now, suffice it to say: every machine on your shelf that “draws current in standby” is a line item in the energy bill that the homelab movement rarely accounts for.

Not for Everyone. And It Should Not Be This Way.

There is a second level of the paradox that is even more uncomfortable than the first. Building a homelab costs money – relatively little, but it costs. It requires physical space. It requires a decent connection. And it requires time. A lot of time. Not installation time – that is measurable, finite. The learning time that precedes everything else. To reach the point where you can build a functional infrastructure with Proxmox, LXC containers, centralised authentication, reverse proxy, automated backups – you need to have a