At some point, in the middle of the configuration files, a line in /boot/config reminded me which architecture I was working on. Years earlier I had spent entire nights flashing custom ROMs onto Android smartphones (XDA always be praised, ora pro nobis): CyanogenMod, then LineageOS. The ritual was always the same – unlock the bootloader, root the device, replace the factory operating system with something more honest, enjoy the result. I was doing it for the same reason I was now configuring Nextcloud: I didn't want anyone else deciding what could run on my hardware.

What struck me that morning was an apparently trivial detail. The processor inside the Raspberry Pi – a Broadcom BCM2837 – used the same architecture as the processors in the smartphones I had been hacking for years. ARM. The same instruction set, the same underlying logic, the same family. The chip holding up my small home server was a direct cousin of the ones I had tried to free from their factory software. And neither had ever been manufactured by the company that designed them.

This short circuit is the starting point for what I want to tell. Because ARM is one of the most important stories in computing of the last forty years, and almost nobody tells it the right way. The standard version is a triumphal march: a small British company invents an efficient architecture, low-power chips conquer the world, today ARM is everywhere – in your phone, your router, the board running a small server in your homelab, in Amazon's datacentres. Democratisation. Progress. Triumph of British ingenuity.

It's all true. But it's also profoundly incomplete.

A room in Cambridge, a government project, and a woman nobody mentions

The story of ARM doesn't begin in a Silicon Valley garage. It begins in Cambridge, in 1983, at a small company called Acorn Computers, on 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 wasn't enough. Acorn needed something more powerful for the next step, and the processors available on the market – 6502, Z80, the early Intel proposals – were either too slow, too complex, or too expensive. So Acorn's R&D team decided to design one from scratch, drawing inspiration from Patterson and Ditzel's work at Berkeley on RISC architecture: simple instructions, executed quickly, few transistors, low power. The result, in 1985, was the ARM1: thirty thousand transistors, no cache, no microcode.

The person who designed the architecture and the instruction set of that ARM1 was called Sophie Wilson. Her approach is summed up in a sentence she gave in an interview to The Telegraph and which is worth reporting:

“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: subtract rather than add, simplify rather than complicate.

There's an episode that tells 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 amounted to a handful of people – Wilson on the instruction set, Furber on the microarchitecture design, a few collaborators around them – and was operating with derisory 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 an interview to The Register in 2012, 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 wasn't actually reaching the chip, and the processor was running on 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”.

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

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

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

It's worth pausing on Wilson for a moment, because the standard story of ARM mentions her in passing. Wilson is the person who wrote the fundamental rules on which 99% of mobile devices on the planet run today. Those rules – the original ARM instruction set – still survive, extended but recognisable, in every Cortex-A that goes into production in 2026. In 2012, Wilson and Furber received the Fellow Award from the Computer History Museum. In 2013 Wilson was elected Fellow of the Royal Society. In 2019 she was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her services to computing. In the 1990s she completed her gender transition, continuing to work in the field – a fact that tech communities systematically omit or relegate to the margins, as if it weren't an integral part of the story of who built what and under which conditions.

In 1990, Acorn, Apple and VLSI Technology founded a separate joint venture to manage and licence 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 unprecedented in the sector: it would never manufacture a single chip. It would sell the idea of the chip. Licences, royalties, IP. Anyone wanting to build an ARM processor would have to pay them.

It was a technical choice, but also a political one. ARM didn't have the capital to build factories, didn't have the infrastructure. But it had something harder to replicate: a clean architecture, efficient, 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 processor architectures and grants their use under licence 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 price of the final device. Whoever buys the licence can then build their own chips based on that architecture, customising it within the limits allowed by the contract. They don't buy a product: they buy the right to make one.

Garnsey, Lorenzoni and Ferriani, in a foundational study on ARM's birth as a spin-off from Acorn published in Research Policy in 2008, describe this transition as an exemplary case of techno-organizational speciation: technology isn't simply transferred but transforms radically in its passage to a new domain through a new organisational model. ARM isn't Acorn that changed name: it's a new organism, with a completely different survival logic, carrying the DNA of the original but adapting to an environment Acorn could never have inhabited.

The practical result of this structure is what the industry calls neutral positioning. ARM doesn't compete with its customers – doesn't sell chips, doesn't make devices – so it can sell the same licence to Qualcomm, Apple, Samsung and MediaTek, who fight each other in the market every day. It's the “Switzerland” of silicon: a credible arbiter, a common infrastructure, a layer on which everyone builds without anyone having to trust anyone else. 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, has summed up the result in a way that's 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's not rhetoric: it's the logical consequence of a model that multiplies adoption rather than concentrating it.

But this neutrality has a structural cost rarely brought to the table. When ARM sells a licence, it also sells dependence. Whoever builds their 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 enormous. And this means that ARM, while producing nothing, exercises enormous systemic power: it can renegotiate licence terms, raise royalties, decide who gets access to the most advanced architectures and who doesn't.

Abstract as this dependence may sound on paper, there's a recent case that makes it very concrete – and worth following in detail, because it illustrates exactly how ARM's power operates in the real world.

In 2021, Qualcomm acquired for 1.4 billion dollars 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 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 lower royalties than Nuvia's. Qualcomm argued that the integration of Nuvia into its chips fell under its pre-existing ALA. ARM responded that no: the acquisition required renegotiation from scratch – on ARM's terms, naturally. In 2022 ARM took Qualcomm to court demanding, among other things, the physical destruction of pre-acquisition Nuvia designs. Not a downsizing, not a renegotiation: destruction. The message wasn't ambiguous: IP licensing isn't a sale, it's a revocable permit, and the permit is granted by whoever owns the architecture.

The case went to trial in Wilmington, Delaware, in December 2024. The jury ruled unanimously in Qualcomm's favour 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 internal documents, admitted to having recorded historic licensing and royalty revenues after attempting to terminate Nuvia's ALA in 2022 – which, translated: while declaring itself damaged by Nuvia's actions, ARM was making boatloads of money precisely thanks to the ecosystem built on that architecture.

ARM has announced it will appeal. Qualcomm, for its part, has had a counter-suit open since April 2024 against ARM – accusing it of withholding technical deliverables, anti-competitive behaviour, and (in a subsequent amendment) of wanting to enter the server chip market as a direct competitor. The trial, initially set for March 2026, has been postponed to October 2026 to clear a series of pending motions – a sign that the complexity of the dispute doesn't dissolve easily. That is to say: ARM, which built everything on neutral positioning, finds itself accused in court of wanting to become a silicon manufacturer. 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 take to court anyone who thinks they can use that documentation without the right permission. Langdon Winner, in his influential essay Do Artifacts Have Politics? of 1980, argued that technological choices are never neutral – they embed structures of power, 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 from a public computer literacy project becomes the foundation on which an invisible monopoly is built across tens of billions of devices. It's not malevolence. It's structure. The chip has no intentions. But the licensing structure on top of it does.

A new front: the datacentre

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

For the first part of its history, ARM was the architecture of mobile. Servers, datacentres, enterprise computing were Intel territory: x86 dominated apparently uncontested. 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 solid: at equal load, ARM chips consumed far less energy than their x86 equivalents, and in a datacentre where the electricity bill is a third of operating costs, that translates directly into margin.

Since then the trajectory has been steady and surprisingly fast. In 2023 ARM represented around 5% of the cloud compute of the three big hyperscalers. ARM itself, in its 2025 communications, claims that by year-end roughly half of the compute shipped to top hyperscalers will be ARM-based – an estimate to be taken with the caution due to a company speaking about its own market, but consistent with what AWS has confirmed directly: for the third year running, more than half of new CPU capacity added to AWS is Graviton, and 98% of the top 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 Neoverse V3 ARMv9.2 cores at 3 nanometres. Google has launched Axion (based on Neoverse V2) with claims of 65% better price-performance than x86 instances. Microsoft has rolled Cobalt 100 out to 29 global regions. NVIDIA – the same NVIDIA that had tried to buy ARM – uses ARM Neoverse cores in Grace, the CPU that pairs with 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 the world's datacentres.

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

This sheds light, in turn, on why Qualcomm pushed the Nuvia case with such determination. And why – as we'll see in a moment – it's looking for an architectural way out.

The failed coup

November 2020. Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, announces the acquisition of ARM from SoftBank for 40 billion dollars. It would have been the largest deal in semiconductor history. It didn't 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 reach:

“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 with 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 everyone else continued to pay royalties. Qualcomm, Microsoft and Google opposed publicly. The American FTC opened an antitrust proceeding. The European Commission launched an investigation. Britain opened its own. China raised the red flag. In February 2022, the deal was formally cancelled for significant regulatory challenges.

There's another statement by Hauser worth quoting. In an interview with UKTN in 2022, he called British politicians “technologically illiterate” and “the root cause” of the governance problems around ARM. He argued 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 nobody had thought, at the right 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 dollars. 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 doesn't eliminate the problem – it shifts it. ARM is independent, but it's a very particular form of independence: that of a systemic infrastructure in the hands of financial investors, subject to the logic of the stock market, obliged to grow revenues every quarter. The uncomfortable question is: what happens when the needs of a commons architecture – stable, predictable, accessible, neutral – clash with the needs of a publicly-traded company that has to raise royalties to satisfy shareholders? It's not a theoretical question. ARM has systematically raised its licensing fees in recent years. And the big licensees have started looking for alternatives.

The half-finished democratisation

Credit must be given where credit is due before continuing the critique. And what ARM deserves is considerable.

The Raspberry Pi I had on the table that Saturday morning – the version 3 in 2017, the 5 today – costs less than eighty euros for the most recent version. It's 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 x86 processors can't approach. 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 driving IoT sensors at a few cents apiece. To the embedded processors in medical devices, industrial control systems, critical infrastructure. ARM has materially lowered the cost of access to computing hardware on a global scale.

Wilson herself, looking back at 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 after chip, of licences negotiated one at a time, before the world realised ARM was everywhere.

The “democratisation” performed 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 of modifying it, no transparency about what runs at that level. The chip is ARM, the device is a closed box. This is the final contradiction: you can have the right – or almost – to manage the software running on an ARM chip, but under the kernel, under the bootloader, there's a chip whose architecture was defined in Cambridge, manufactured in Taiwan, integrated into a SoC designed by Broadcom, over which you have no control whatsoever. Sovereignty ends exactly where the 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.

The Linux moment for hardware

And here RISC-V enters the scene. And the story gets more interesting.

RISC-V was born in 2010 at the University of California Berkeley, in the same department that had contributed to inspiring 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 wanting custom chips without paying ARM. In the last two or three years the proportions have changed. SHD Group, a market analysis firm tracking the RISC-V sector since 2019, announced at the RISC-V Summit in November 2025 that the technology's market penetration has crossed 25% – an important symbolic threshold, though to be taken with some caution. The very RISC-V International annual report of 2025 admits it isn't entirely clear whether the 25% refers to the global microprocessor market in the strict sense or only to segments where RISC-V already has a meaningful presence (embedded, IoT, microcontrollers). The SHD projection for 2031 is 33.7%. However it's measured, the trajectory is that of an architecture that's no longer a niche: it's the third pillar of computing, alongside x86 and ARM.

The strength of RISC-V isn't only technical – it's 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 New York-listed company 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 moved strategically from Delaware to Switzerland in March 2020, formally putting it out of reach of unilateral American export controls. Alibaba, through its T-Head division, has released the XuanTie C920 and successive chips. Smaller Chinese manufacturers are flooding the mid-market with RISC-V AI accelerators that cost significantly less than the sanctioned Western equivalents. It's an architectural decoupling, not only a commercial one.

The European front. The European Union, through the EU Chips Act, is funding 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 sixth shareholder in 2024), developed RT-Europa in 2025, 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 was closing 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 its way out of needing ARM. It's the most significant move in the entire recent story, because for the first time one of the major ARM licensees has equipped itself with a credible architectural plan B.

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

And here the question: will RISC-V be incorporated by capitalism just as Linux was? The honest answer is: probably yes, and it already has been in part. The major RISC-V implementations from Apple, Google and Meta aren't open source – they use the open instruction set to build proprietary architectures. The fact that the foundation is free doesn't mean everything built on top of it is. The same logic Boltanski and Chiapello described holds: critique isn't defeated, it's incorporated. But at least the foundation remains open. And that matters.

Conclusions – or questions, if you prefer

ARM is born from a public mandate and a democratisation project, and becomes the foundation of a private oligopoly. The chip is the same; the structure of power on top of it is radically different from the one that produced it. And that chip really did lower the entry barriers for hardware manufacturers – 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 have gained no real sovereignty over the silicon they hold in their pockets.

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 action against anyone trying to step outside the contractual terms – troubles no regulator, generates no headlines, produces no parliamentary hearings. It's the kind of power that becomes invisible precisely because it's structural: it doesn't sit in a decision, it sits in the conditions within which decisions are made.

There's also a contradiction that concerns me personally. That Raspberry Pi I had on the table – and all the ARM chips in the phones I've been hacking for years – were already, in some sense, part of a system I didn't control. I changed the software on top. I didn't change the structure of power underneath (the same could be said of Intel, ça va sans dire...). Digital sovereignty stops exactly where the 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 might be a commons, rather than private property subject to corporate decisions and legal battles. It doesn't solve the problem of closed hardware on top, doesn't solve the problem of oligopolistic foundries, doesn't solve any of the contradictions described. But at least it doesn't make them worse. It's the same logic of the open hardware movement, which has been trying for twenty years to apply to silicon what free software applied to code – with more modest results, because the physical layer is structurally more hostile to the commons: if you can't open it, you don't own it. And in a sector where every layer of the technology stack has been systematically fenced in, 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 embed structures of power. Structures of power persist long after the original choices have been forgotten. And whoever controls the basic infrastructure – the instruction set, the architecture, the licences – controls something far 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 ARM's history and 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. – Patterson, D., Ditzel, D. (1980). “The Case for the Reduced Instruction Set Computer”. ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News, 8(6): 25-33. – Garnsey, E., Fleck, V. (1988). “Acorn Computers and technology policy”. International Journal of Technology Management, 2(3-4): 554-566.

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.

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 – 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 the 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/ – Furber, S. (2010). Interview with ACM Queue: “A Conversation with Steve Furber”. https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1716385 – Furber, S. (2011). Interview with Communications of the ACM. https://cacm.acm.org/news/an-interview-with-steve-furber/ – 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.

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 – SHD Group (2025). RISC-V market analysis presented at RISC-V Summit North America, November 2025. – 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/ – 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/ – Quintauris GmbH (2023). “Five Leading Semiconductor Industry Players Incorporate New Company, Quintauris, to Drive RISC-V Ecosystem Forward”. Press release of 22 December 2023. https://www.quintauris.com

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