Arm Holdings (ARM): Company Overview, Stock, Financials & Latest News

Quick Facts

Arm Holdings plc at a glance (figures current as of early July 2026)

Ticker	ARM (Nasdaq)
Founded	November 1990, as Advanced RISC Machines Ltd, spun out of Acorn Computers
Headquarters	Cambridge, United Kingdom
Original architects	Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber, designers of the first ARM processor at Acorn Computers
CEO	Rene Haas, Chief Executive Officer
Majority owner	SoftBank Group Corp
IPO date	September 2023, on the Nasdaq, the largest US tech listing of that year
Industry	Semiconductor intellectual property, CPU and GPU architecture licensing
Market capitalization	Roughly $330 billion to $355 billion depending on daily trading
Fiscal year 2026 revenue	$4.92 billion, up 23 percent year over year
Q4 FY2026 revenue	$1.49 billion, up 20 percent year over year
Dividend	None paid
Key customers	Apple, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung, Amazon Web Services, Google, MediaTek

What Is Arm Holdings?

Arm Holdings is a British semiconductor design company that creates the underlying architecture and blueprints used to build computer processors, then licenses that intellectual property to chipmakers and device manufacturers around the world. Rather than manufacturing chips itself, Arm operates a capital light licensing model: it designs efficient, low power CPU and GPU architectures, licenses them to partners such as Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung, and Nvidia, and then collects a royalty on every chip that partner ships using Arm’s technology.

This business model has made Arm architecture the dominant standard in mobile computing, powering well over 99 percent of the world’s smartphones, and it has expanded aggressively into new markets including personal computers, automotive systems, data centers, and Internet of Things devices. In 2026, Arm has pushed further into artificial intelligence infrastructure with the launch of its own in house designed data center CPU, the Arm AGI CPU, marking the company’s most direct move yet from being purely an architecture licensor toward also designing complete chips.

Arm is majority owned by Japan’s SoftBank Group, which took the company private in 2016 and returned it to public markets in one of the largest technology initial public offerings in history in September 2023.

Company History

Arm’s origins trace back to Acorn Computers, a British computer maker founded in Cambridge in 1978. In the mid 1980s, Acorn engineers Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber designed the ARM1, widely regarded as the world’s first commercial reduced instruction set computing, or RISC, processor, which famously worked correctly on its very first silicon run in April 1985. The ARM1 and its successors powered Acorn’s Archimedes line of home computers.

As Acorn faced financial difficulties in the late 1980s, its processor technology was spun out in November 1990 as a new company, Advanced RISC Machines Ltd, structured as a joint venture between Acorn, Apple, and chip manufacturer VLSI Technology. Apple’s roughly $3 million investment was driven by its need for a low power chip for the Newton handheld device. From its earliest days, Arm chose a licensing based business model rather than manufacturing chips itself, a decision that proved well suited to the explosive later growth of mobile computing.

Key milestones

Selected company history timeline

Period	Event
1985	Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber design the ARM1 processor at Acorn Computers, the foundation of the ARM architecture.
November 1990	Advanced RISC Machines Ltd is incorporated in Cambridge as a spin off joint venture between Acorn, Apple, and VLSI Technology.
1998	Arm goes public for the first time, listing on the London Stock Exchange and Nasdaq under founding CEO Robin Saxby, who had built out the company’s licensing business model.
2016	SoftBank Group acquires Arm for approximately £24.3 billion, taking the company private and committing to expand its UK workforce.
2020	Nvidia announces a planned $40 billion acquisition of Arm from SoftBank.
February 2022	The Nvidia acquisition is abandoned following sustained regulatory opposition from competition authorities in the United Kingdom, European Union, and United States.
September 2023	Arm returns to public markets through a $4.87 billion initial public offering on the Nasdaq, the largest United States technology listing of the year, valuing the company at approximately $54.5 billion.
2024 to 2025	Arm reports consecutive years of more than 20 percent annual revenue growth, driven by Armv9 architecture adoption, growing data center royalties, and expansion into automotive and edge AI.
2026	Arm launches its first in house designed silicon product, the Arm AGI CPU for AI data centers, alongside continued legal proceedings in its long running licensing dispute with Qualcomm.

Founders

Arm’s technology has its roots in the work of two Acorn Computers engineers, while the company itself was founded as a joint venture rather than by a single entrepreneurial founder in the traditional sense.

Arm Ltd itself was formally incorporated in November 1990 as a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple, and VLSI Technology. Robin Saxby became the company’s founding Chief Executive Officer in 1991, and is widely credited with developing the licensing based business model that allowed Arm to scale globally without manufacturing chips, leading the company through its first public listing in 1998.

CEO

Rene Haas serves as Chief Executive Officer of Arm Holdings. Haas joined Arm in 2013 and previously led the company’s IP Products Group before being named Chief Executive Officer in February 2022, taking over amid the collapse of the proposed Nvidia acquisition. Under Haas’s leadership, Arm has pursued a strategy of diversifying beyond its traditional smartphone licensing base into data centers, automotive, and edge artificial intelligence, and has pushed the company toward designing its own silicon products for the first time with the 2026 launch of the Arm AGI CPU. Haas has also been a prominent voice on Arm’s expanding role in AI infrastructure and its relationship with SoftBank Group, Arm’s controlling shareholder.

Headquarters

Arm Holdings is headquartered in Cambridge, United Kingdom, in the same technology cluster where the company’s original processor architecture was developed at Acorn Computers in the 1980s. Arm also maintains a significant presence in the United States, including offices in Austin, Texas and San Jose, California, along with operations across other major technology markets including China, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, reflecting its role as a global supplier of chip architecture to semiconductor companies worldwide.

Business Segments

Arm’s business is built around two primary revenue streams, supplemented by an emerging silicon design business.

Products and Services

Arm’s product portfolio spans processor architecture, pre-built chip subsystems, and, as of 2026, its first fully designed silicon product.

• CPU intellectual property: Licensable central processing unit designs based on the ARM instruction set architecture, used across smartphones, tablets, laptops, servers, and embedded devices.
• GPU and NPU IP: Graphics processing unit and neural processing unit accelerator designs used to handle graphics rendering and on device AI workloads.
• System IP and interconnects: Supporting technology that connects processor cores and other chip components, helping licensees build complete, efficient system on chip designs.
• Compute Subsystems, or CSS: Pre-integrated combinations of Arm CPU, GPU, and system IP that reduce design time and cost for customers building smartphone, tablet, and data center chips.
• Arm AGI CPU: Arm’s first in house designed data center processor, launched in 2026 and built specifically to handle agentic AI workloads, representing the company’s entry into designing complete chips rather than only licensing architecture.
• Development tools and software: A broad ecosystem of software development kits, compilers, and tools that support chip designers and software developers building on Arm based platforms.

Revenue Breakdown

Arm’s revenue is split primarily between licensing and royalties, both of which grew strongly in fiscal year 2026, which ended March 31, 2026.

Within royalty revenue, growth was broad based across smartphones, edge AI, physical AI, and cloud AI, with data center royalty revenue more than doubling year over year in the fourth quarter alone, reflecting rapid adoption of Arm based Neoverse processors by cloud providers. Within licensing revenue, growth was supported by strong demand for Compute Subsystem products and by early customer commitments tied to the newly launched Arm AGI CPU, which generated more than $2 billion in customer demand across fiscal years 2027 and 2028 within months of its introduction, more than double the level initially targeted at launch.

Financial Performance

Arm has delivered three consecutive fiscal years of more than 20 percent revenue growth, while also significantly increasing research and development spending to support its expansion into silicon design and AI infrastructure.

Selected fourth quarter and full year fiscal 2026 financial results

Metric	Q4 FY2026	Full year FY2026
Revenue	$1.49 billion, up 20 percent	$4.92 billion, up 23 percent
Licensing revenue	$819 million, up 29 percent	$2.31 billion, up 25 percent
Royalty revenue	$671 million, up 11 percent	$2.61 billion, up 21 percent
Non-GAAP diluted EPS	$0.60, a new quarterly record	$1.77, up from $1.63
GAAP net income	$313 million, up from $210 million	Full year figure reflects higher R&D investment
Non-GAAP operating margin	Approximately 49 percent	Approximately 43.0 percent, down from prior year
Annualized contract value	$1.66 billion, up 22 percent year over year	Reflects growing licensing backlog

Arm’s non-GAAP operating margin declined slightly for the full year despite strong revenue growth, largely because non-GAAP operating expenses rose 33 percent as the company invested heavily in research and development to support the Arm AGI CPU program and broader AI infrastructure ambitions. Management has said supply availability, rather than customer demand, is now the primary constraint on how quickly the Arm AGI CPU business can scale, noting the company has secured manufacturing capacity to cover its first $1 billion in orders but has not yet locked in capacity for the next $1 billion of demand.

Stock Information

Arm Holdings returned to public markets in September 2023 through an initial public offering on the Nasdaq priced at $51 per share, valuing the company at approximately $54.5 billion in what was the largest United States technology listing of that year. The stock has since been characterized by significant volatility, reflecting both strong underlying growth and a valuation that many analysts consider demanding relative to near term earnings.

Snapshot trading data as of early July 2026

Recent share price	Roughly $310 to $340, varying by session
Market capitalization	Approximately $330 billion to $355 billion depending on the trading day
52 week range	Approximately $100.02 to $452.70
Price to earnings ratio	Extremely high on a trailing GAAP basis, reflecting a valuation built around future AI and data center growth
Analyst consensus	Generally Buy to Moderate Buy, with a wide range of price targets recently raised into the $400 to $475 range by several major firms
Majority shareholder	SoftBank Group Corp, which retains a large controlling stake following the 2023 IPO

ARM shares have shown a pattern of sharp single day swings tied to quarterly earnings, updates on Arm AGI CPU supply and demand, developments in the Qualcomm litigation, and broader sentiment toward AI infrastructure spending. Several major banks, including UBS, BofA Securities, and TD Cowen, raised their price targets significantly in mid 2026 following strong data center and AI related commentary, even as some analysts have flagged valuation concerns given Arm’s very high price to earnings ratio relative to more established semiconductor peers.

Dividends

Arm Holdings does not currently pay a dividend to its shareholders. As a company investing heavily in research and development to expand from architecture licensing into silicon design and AI data center infrastructure, Arm is directing its cash flow toward growth initiatives such as the Arm AGI CPU program rather than shareholder distributions. This approach is common among high growth technology companies prioritizing reinvestment, and investors in ARM are generally positioned for capital appreciation tied to continued expansion in AI, data center, and edge computing markets rather than income.

Competitors

Arm competes across several layers of the semiconductor industry, from alternative processor architectures to the chip designers who are simultaneously Arm’s licensees and, in some product areas, its rivals.

Selected Arm Holdings competitors

Competitor	Positioning
RISC-V ecosystem	An open, royalty free processor architecture backed by a broad industry consortium, viewed as the most significant long term architectural alternative to Arm’s licensed instruction set model, particularly in cost sensitive and government backed chip programs.
Intel and AMD	Dominant providers of x86 based processors for personal computers and servers, an architecture that Arm has been steadily gaining share against in areas such as cloud data centers and, more recently, Windows laptops.
Qualcomm	One of Arm’s largest licensees for smartphone and PC chips, but also a company Arm has been locked in a multi year legal dispute with over licensing terms tied to Qualcomm’s Nuvia derived custom CPU cores, with a related trial expected in 2026.
Nvidia	A major Arm licensee that uses Arm based CPU cores in its data center and automotive platforms, making the relationship both collaborative and, in certain custom silicon efforts, potentially competitive over time.
Apple and Samsung custom silicon teams	Large technology companies that license Arm’s architecture but design significant portions of their own custom chips in house, giving them more direct control over performance and efficiency than many other Arm licensees.

Arm’s most closely watched competitive relationship in 2026 has been its ongoing legal dispute with Qualcomm, centered on whether Qualcomm’s Nuvia derived custom CPU cores are properly licensed under its agreement with Arm. Qualcomm has won key rulings in the case, including a December 2024 jury verdict and a 2025 court decision rejecting Arm’s request for a new trial, while a separate Qualcomm breach of contract lawsuit against Arm has been expected to go to trial in 2026. The dispute has drawn attention across the industry given both companies’ central roles in smartphone and PC chip design.

Recent News

• May 2026, record Q4 and full year fiscal 2026 results: Arm reported record fourth quarter revenue of $1.49 billion and full year revenue of $4.92 billion, alongside the launch of its Arm AGI CPU data center processor, though shares fell in the days following the report on investor concerns about whether Arm can secure enough manufacturing supply to meet surging demand for the new chip.
• 2026, Arm AGI CPU demand surge: Customer commitments for the Arm AGI CPU across fiscal years 2027 and 2028 grew from an initial $1 billion target to more than $2 billion within months of launch, with management targeting a longer term goal of building this into a $15 billion business, while acknowledging that manufacturing capacity, not demand, is now the key constraint.
• Mid 2026, analyst price target increases: Several major banks, including UBS, Bank of America, and TD Cowen, raised their price targets on ARM shares significantly in June 2026, citing rising demand for Arm based CPUs in agentic AI applications and continued data center royalty growth.
• Ongoing, Qualcomm litigation: Arm’s multi year legal dispute with Qualcomm over the licensing status of Qualcomm’s Nuvia derived custom CPU cores has continued, with Qualcomm winning key rulings in the original case and a separate Qualcomm breach of contract lawsuit against Arm expected to reach trial in 2026.
• 2026, broader semiconductor sector rally: ARM shares have moved in tandem with a broader rally across chip stocks in 2026, driven by continued AI infrastructure spending, alongside occasional sharp pullbacks tied to profit taking and valuation concerns across the sector.
• Ongoing, SoftBank ownership and strategy: As Arm’s majority shareholder, SoftBank Group’s own financial activities, including reported financing discussions tied to its broader AI investment strategy, have continued to draw investor attention given the potential implications for Arm’s ownership structure and strategic direction.

Frequently Asked Questions

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