8 ms·

ARM: Can 'crown jewel' of UK technology be protected?

85 points by headalgorithm 6y ago

sys_64738 6y ago
Why is government interfering with private enterprise? The UK gov't always does this.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
brian_herman__ 6y ago
Hasn't the ship already sailed? It was sold to softbank and now NVidia? It seems a too late for this. edit: Get rid of little to late and change to too late.
- archgoon 6y ago
  Apparently; when ARM was first sold to Softbank, Softbank made several guarantees to the UK. Nvidia has made no agreement to continue those guarantees. > At that time, Softbank announced it had agreed to legally binding commitments to increase investment, headcount and preserve its headquarters in the UK. > It is not too late for the government to impose conditions, but conversations on whether to impose them or what they might be have not even started.
  - mytailorisrich 6y ago
    The UK is not in a position of strength at the moment. Brexit might give us back 'control' from Brussels but does not exactly give us the upper hand in commercial negotiations with the US. Now, I'm sure that Nvidia will want the deal to close smoothly and will thus be willing to give similar guarantees. Of course the trick is that these guarantees usually (and sensibly) come with a time limit, which also suits governments, so don't mean that much in fine.
  - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
    They should move HQ to Ireland to maintain easy access to the European talent pool.
  - fluffything 6y ago
    > Nvidia has made no agreement to continue those guarantees. Hasn't Nvidia has actually increased those guarantees with everything they have agreed on for buying ARM?
    - throwaway2048 6y ago
      Do you have a source for this?
      - fluffything 6y ago
        The actual nvidia announcement linked in the original post? (https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-to-acquire-arm-for-40-billion-creating-worlds-premier-computing-company-for-the-age-of-ai https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-to-acquire-arm-for...) I could quote the whole post, but to satisfy UK regulators, NVIDIA committed to: > NVIDIA will expand Arm’s R&D presence in Cambridge, UK, by establishing a world-class AI research and education center, and building an Arm/NVIDIA-powered AI supercomputer for groundbreaking research which is much more than Softbank ever did. And the list of things they commited to goes on, and probably will continue to increase as the US and China get their says on this.
  - OJFord 6y ago
    I would assume Nvidia bought (by obligation) those commitments too? Otherwise it would be pointless having them in the first place, you'd just get out of it (if you wanted to) with some creative corporate governance. [I used to work at Arm, but not on creative corporate governance.]
    - toyg 6y ago
      Uhm, no...? The obligation was on Softbank, not on ARM. > you'd just get out of it (if you wanted to) with some creative corporate governance ... aand you've just "discovered" how large companies routinely get out of their commitments to politicians.
      - jlokier 6y ago
        > The obligation was on Softbank, not on ARM Plausibly the obligation on Softbank could require them, when selling, to require the new buyer agree to the same obligation.
- xchaotic 6y ago
  Great Britain is now much more desperate. It needs to compete for market share and access to markets like a 3rd world country but without the associated cheap labour so high tech is one of the few anchors where Britain might have USP. But as you say with ARM that ship has sailed with the previous sale to SoftBank. The only chance to salvage some of the know how (not the IP) would be if these specialists could find similar jobs in Cambridge but there simply isn’t enough opportunities especially as the broader market is dire battered by brexit covid and general stagflation. Not an enviable position- bit like Japan a few years back.
  - uzakov 6y ago
    To add to this comment(might be biased as I live and work in the UK): salaries here are just not on the USA level, while costs of items are the same, if not higher(check Apple products price difference on the official website, clothing etc). For many of high demand engineers the choice is London/Manchester or move to the USA
    - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
      LOL, that's rich, engineers in the UK feeling underpaid when you have the best market for SW engineers in Europe(London). Wanna see underpaid? Come to Austria.
      - uzakov 6y ago
        I haven't been to Austria but numbeo seems to suggest what you say is incorrect on majority if not most of parameters https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Austria&city1=Vienna&country2=United+Kingdom&city2=London https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
        ChuckNorris89 6y ago
        Income levels wise, Numbeo is just a mish-mash full of noise and can't be taken seriously to judge salaries of skilled professionals(that's what we're talking about right?) Sure, poor people have it better in Vienna because it's cheaper and has better social services than London but skilled professionals(developers and engineers) have it worse as underpaying is rampant in the tech industry there. Sources: me living there and my friends living in the UK
Spooky23 6y ago
A: No.
- fluffything 6y ago
  Of course it can? Just buy it from Softbank at over 40bn$. "It's as simple as that". What the choosing beggars want, however, is getting ARM back from Softbank for free. After Softbank paid 32bn$ for it. And there you are right, ain't gonna happen.
  - primrose 6y ago
    I'm not so sure UK politicians would know what to do with a complicated tech company.
    - dimitrios1 6y ago
      The answer is leave it the f___ alone. Why do people think politicians need to do anything?
      - sasum 6y ago
        Because we live in a world where governments use their power to prop up certain companies, giving them a competitive advantage.
    - QuesnayJr 6y ago
      If they're serious about it, they could buy it to IPO it later.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
klelatti 6y ago
The irony in all this is that a government that says it wants to create a 'trillion dollar tech giant' has no idea what to do with the one world leading tech company that is based in the UK. [1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/09/11/cummings-plan-create-uk-trillionaire-tech-giant-admirable/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/09/11/cummings-p...
- Rexxar 6y ago
  > Cummings suggested that a no-deal Brexit could allow the Government to offer state aid to the country’s most promising technology businesses The second level irony is that it's the UK that has always been the main opponent to every state subsidies while they were in European union.
  - klelatti 6y ago
    Third level irony: UK tech sector wants freedom of movement across the EU and would rather not have state aid.
Hokusai 6y ago
> but conversations on whether to impose them or what they might be have not even started. Sorry for the cheap shot, but the current government is not very good at starting conversations, signing agreements or to to keep them.
LatteLazy 6y ago
I'm very confused. We sold this to the Japanese already!
- tyingq 6y ago
  Yeah, I'm confused as well. SoftBank could have done things the UK didn't like. They've owned ARM since mid 2016.
  - dageshi 6y ago
    Probably a couple reasons why it's coming up now. First the Japanese have a pretty good reputation as owners of UK businesses, they own quite a few Scotch distilleries and impressions are they manage things well. Second, I think the world feels a lot more protectionist nowadays vs when the original buyout happened. I know it wasn't that long ago but the trade war tariffs between the US and China sort of set the tone.
    - toyg 6y ago
      The level of anxiety about capital and industrial flight in the UK is also much higher due to Brexit.
  - mongol 6y ago
    Sounds like the story with Volvo Cars. Ford sold it to Geely, but it was like it was sold to a foreign owner in the first place.
- ian-g 6y ago
  But to quote the article: Softbank [...] agreed to legally binding commitments to increase investment, headcount and preserve its headquarters in the UK.
- jariel 6y ago
  SoftBank is a financial investor, bankers, so they can have influence, but it's more like having 'a single public investor' instead of a bunch of them. NVIDIA is another ballgame entirely, it's a corporation in the space, meaning some kind of merger on some kind of scale.
tus88 6y ago
Isn't apple about to design their own cpu? I would be selling arm asap.
- eyesee 6y ago
  Apple has been designing their own CPU's for a decade, using the ARM ISA. Apple has a perpetual license to the ISA though, so they would not be a source of future revenue. Apple is also under no obligation to stick with ARM's roadmap for future products.
  - giancarlostoro 6y ago
    This is something I have wondered about and had no idea they basically had some sort of perpetual license. Is this normal for ARM to give out such a license? Or are all ARM licenses basically typically under those conditions? I know ARM mostly just licenses specs to their chips.
    - NetBeck 6y ago
      Apple + Acorn Computers = ARM[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers#ARM_Ltd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers#ARM_Ltd.
    - jannes 6y ago
      ARM is a joint venture that Apple started with Acorn and VLSI. Article from 1990: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-11-28-fi-4993-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-11-28-fi-4993-s...
      - giancarlostoro 6y ago
        Wow I had no idea, now a lot of things make more sense to me about why Apple is going the route they are. I honestly wish them nothing but success. Part of me hopes they license their own chips down the line. The Intel monopoly over desktop systems needs to end.
merrvk 6y ago
Who needs ARM when you have solid investments in companies like OneWeb
- nickik 6y ago
  I hope your joking
petercooper 6y ago
I've been doing a lot of thinking out loud today about the UK's lamentable state with regards to its technology industry today without much disagreement in my back channels – perhaps HN will have more interesting things to say? It feels like the UK's failings in the technology space are entirely cultural. Looking back at the 70s and 80s when the UK punched above its weight in the microcomputer space, UK tech companies remained very insular and the people who got rich tended to just retire or move on to other industries. This seems to happen wave after wave in the UK. The big names of any decade are no longer around in the next one because they got rich and quit. The US seems to have a culture of building up business communities in a way the UK doesn't through investment and people staying in the game for multiple decades. There are thousands of paper multi-millionaires who continue to work 40 hour weeks in the US in a way you'd never see in the UK. It's also far less common in the UK for people who got rich off tech to reinvest back into the nascent companies in their space rather than retire. And who's giving multi millions to CS institutions like Imperial or St Andrews in the same way US billionaires do to Stanford and MIT? Where are the charismatic titans of UK technology? Maybe I'm being unfair, but I can't put my finger on any of it with any clarity because I don't have my head in the UK tech space too much (I live here but virtually "work in the US", so maybe I'm part of the problem) but something smells funny about British culture when it comes to tech and I'd love to know what the cause of that smell is. The UK is certainly capable of great things. We've seen this in the biomedical, pharma, finance, and energy spaces – how can we be punching above our weight in sectors like those but still have most of our population flocking to American sites like Reddit, Facebook, and Instagram because the local alternatives either don't exist or are terrible?
- klelatti 6y ago
  I don't have easy answers - it's a complex issue and I don't think it's just about tech but about wider issues with British business in general (how many UK companies have tried and failed in the US?) Agreed on pharma but I'm not sure that there are many good examples of success stories outside of that space in e.g. finance. Just to point out that one reason why Arm was so successful early on was that it looked for business everywhere in the world. I think Robin Saxby spent incredible amounts of time in planes travelling on sales trips. I'm don't think that this is true for many UK companies and / or they are not very good at it. This insularity means that firms are in no position to compete with the scale of US firms when they move into the UK market. Edit: great interview with Robin Saxby, Arm's first CEO, talking about the early days of Arm here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FO5PsAY5aaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FO5PsAY5aaI
scruffyherder 6y ago
If arm wanted to stay in the uk they shouldn’t have sold themselves to the Japanese. The UK has always lagged in tech as they still think it’s the 1800’s and their domestic island is enough as they ignored the world in the 80s with low effort 3rd party sourcing at best. As usual the state TV and education could have dominated the English speaking world with BBC micros and education, but again they stayed on their tiny insignificant island. This whole thing is nothing more than sellers re-remorse for selling ARM for next to nothing. Go and do something new.

85 points by headalgorithm 6y ago

sys_64738 6y ago

Why is government interfering with private enterprise? The UK gov't always does this.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

brian_herman__ 6y ago

Hasn't the ship already sailed? It was sold to softbank and now NVidia? It seems a too late for this. edit: Get rid of little to late and change to too late.

archgoon 6y ago
Apparently; when ARM was first sold to Softbank, Softbank made several guarantees to the UK. Nvidia has made no agreement to continue those guarantees. > At that time, Softbank announced it had agreed to legally binding commitments to increase investment, headcount and preserve its headquarters in the UK. > It is not too late for the government to impose conditions, but conversations on whether to impose them or what they might be have not even started.
- mytailorisrich 6y ago
  The UK is not in a position of strength at the moment. Brexit might give us back 'control' from Brussels but does not exactly give us the upper hand in commercial negotiations with the US. Now, I'm sure that Nvidia will want the deal to close smoothly and will thus be willing to give similar guarantees. Of course the trick is that these guarantees usually (and sensibly) come with a time limit, which also suits governments, so don't mean that much in fine.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  They should move HQ to Ireland to maintain easy access to the European talent pool.
- fluffything 6y ago
  > Nvidia has made no agreement to continue those guarantees. Hasn't Nvidia has actually increased those guarantees with everything they have agreed on for buying ARM?
  - throwaway2048 6y ago
    Do you have a source for this?
    - fluffything 6y ago
      The actual nvidia announcement linked in the original post? (https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-to-acquire-arm-for-40-billion-creating-worlds-premier-computing-company-for-the-age-of-ai https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-to-acquire-arm-for...) I could quote the whole post, but to satisfy UK regulators, NVIDIA committed to: > NVIDIA will expand Arm’s R&D presence in Cambridge, UK, by establishing a world-class AI research and education center, and building an Arm/NVIDIA-powered AI supercomputer for groundbreaking research which is much more than Softbank ever did. And the list of things they commited to goes on, and probably will continue to increase as the US and China get their says on this.
- OJFord 6y ago
  I would assume Nvidia bought (by obligation) those commitments too? Otherwise it would be pointless having them in the first place, you'd just get out of it (if you wanted to) with some creative corporate governance. [I used to work at Arm, but not on creative corporate governance.]
  - toyg 6y ago
    Uhm, no...? The obligation was on Softbank, not on ARM. > you'd just get out of it (if you wanted to) with some creative corporate governance ... aand you've just "discovered" how large companies routinely get out of their commitments to politicians.
    - jlokier 6y ago
      > The obligation was on Softbank, not on ARM Plausibly the obligation on Softbank could require them, when selling, to require the new buyer agree to the same obligation.
xchaotic 6y ago
Great Britain is now much more desperate. It needs to compete for market share and access to markets like a 3rd world country but without the associated cheap labour so high tech is one of the few anchors where Britain might have USP. But as you say with ARM that ship has sailed with the previous sale to SoftBank. The only chance to salvage some of the know how (not the IP) would be if these specialists could find similar jobs in Cambridge but there simply isn’t enough opportunities especially as the broader market is dire battered by brexit covid and general stagflation. Not an enviable position- bit like Japan a few years back.
- uzakov 6y ago
  To add to this comment(might be biased as I live and work in the UK): salaries here are just not on the USA level, while costs of items are the same, if not higher(check Apple products price difference on the official website, clothing etc). For many of high demand engineers the choice is London/Manchester or move to the USA
  - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
    LOL, that's rich, engineers in the UK feeling underpaid when you have the best market for SW engineers in Europe(London). Wanna see underpaid? Come to Austria.
    - uzakov 6y ago
      I haven't been to Austria but numbeo seems to suggest what you say is incorrect on majority if not most of parameters https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Austria&city1=Vienna&country2=United+Kingdom&city2=London https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
      - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
        Income levels wise, Numbeo is just a mish-mash full of noise and can't be taken seriously to judge salaries of skilled professionals(that's what we're talking about right?) Sure, poor people have it better in Vienna because it's cheaper and has better social services than London but skilled professionals(developers and engineers) have it worse as underpaying is rampant in the tech industry there. Sources: me living there and my friends living in the UK

Spooky23 6y ago

A: No.

fluffything 6y ago
Of course it can? Just buy it from Softbank at over 40bn$. "It's as simple as that". What the choosing beggars want, however, is getting ARM back from Softbank for free. After Softbank paid 32bn$ for it. And there you are right, ain't gonna happen.
- primrose 6y ago
  I'm not so sure UK politicians would know what to do with a complicated tech company.
  - dimitrios1 6y ago
    The answer is leave it the f___ alone. Why do people think politicians need to do anything?
    - sasum 6y ago
      Because we live in a world where governments use their power to prop up certain companies, giving them a competitive advantage.
  - QuesnayJr 6y ago
    If they're serious about it, they could buy it to IPO it later.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

klelatti 6y ago

The irony in all this is that a government that says it wants to create a 'trillion dollar tech giant' has no idea what to do with the one world leading tech company that is based in the UK. [1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/09/11/cummings-plan-create-uk-trillionaire-tech-giant-admirable/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/09/11/cummings-p...

Rexxar 6y ago
> Cummings suggested that a no-deal Brexit could allow the Government to offer state aid to the country’s most promising technology businesses The second level irony is that it's the UK that has always been the main opponent to every state subsidies while they were in European union.
- klelatti 6y ago
  Third level irony: UK tech sector wants freedom of movement across the EU and would rather not have state aid.

Hokusai 6y ago

> but conversations on whether to impose them or what they might be have not even started. Sorry for the cheap shot, but the current government is not very good at starting conversations, signing agreements or to to keep them.

LatteLazy 6y ago

I'm very confused. We sold this to the Japanese already!

tyingq 6y ago
Yeah, I'm confused as well. SoftBank could have done things the UK didn't like. They've owned ARM since mid 2016.
- dageshi 6y ago
  Probably a couple reasons why it's coming up now. First the Japanese have a pretty good reputation as owners of UK businesses, they own quite a few Scotch distilleries and impressions are they manage things well. Second, I think the world feels a lot more protectionist nowadays vs when the original buyout happened. I know it wasn't that long ago but the trade war tariffs between the US and China sort of set the tone.
  - toyg 6y ago
    The level of anxiety about capital and industrial flight in the UK is also much higher due to Brexit.
- mongol 6y ago
  Sounds like the story with Volvo Cars. Ford sold it to Geely, but it was like it was sold to a foreign owner in the first place.
ian-g 6y ago
But to quote the article: Softbank [...] agreed to legally binding commitments to increase investment, headcount and preserve its headquarters in the UK.
jariel 6y ago
SoftBank is a financial investor, bankers, so they can have influence, but it's more like having 'a single public investor' instead of a bunch of them. NVIDIA is another ballgame entirely, it's a corporation in the space, meaning some kind of merger on some kind of scale.

tus88 6y ago

Isn't apple about to design their own cpu? I would be selling arm asap.

eyesee 6y ago
Apple has been designing their own CPU's for a decade, using the ARM ISA. Apple has a perpetual license to the ISA though, so they would not be a source of future revenue. Apple is also under no obligation to stick with ARM's roadmap for future products.
- giancarlostoro 6y ago
  This is something I have wondered about and had no idea they basically had some sort of perpetual license. Is this normal for ARM to give out such a license? Or are all ARM licenses basically typically under those conditions? I know ARM mostly just licenses specs to their chips.
  - NetBeck 6y ago
    Apple + Acorn Computers = ARM[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers#ARM_Ltd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers#ARM_Ltd.
  - jannes 6y ago
    ARM is a joint venture that Apple started with Acorn and VLSI. Article from 1990: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-11-28-fi-4993-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-11-28-fi-4993-s...
    - giancarlostoro 6y ago
      Wow I had no idea, now a lot of things make more sense to me about why Apple is going the route they are. I honestly wish them nothing but success. Part of me hopes they license their own chips down the line. The Intel monopoly over desktop systems needs to end.

merrvk 6y ago

Who needs ARM when you have solid investments in companies like OneWeb

nickik 6y ago
I hope your joking

petercooper 6y ago

I've been doing a lot of thinking out loud today about the UK's lamentable state with regards to its technology industry today without much disagreement in my back channels – perhaps HN will have more interesting things to say? It feels like the UK's failings in the technology space are entirely cultural. Looking back at the 70s and 80s when the UK punched above its weight in the microcomputer space, UK tech companies remained very insular and the people who got rich tended to just retire or move on to other industries. This seems to happen wave after wave in the UK. The big names of any decade are no longer around in the next one because they got rich and quit. The US seems to have a culture of building up business communities in a way the UK doesn't through investment and people staying in the game for multiple decades. There are thousands of paper multi-millionaires who continue to work 40 hour weeks in the US in a way you'd never see in the UK. It's also far less common in the UK for people who got rich off tech to reinvest back into the nascent companies in their space rather than retire. And who's giving multi millions to CS institutions like Imperial or St Andrews in the same way US billionaires do to Stanford and MIT? Where are the charismatic titans of UK technology? Maybe I'm being unfair, but I can't put my finger on any of it with any clarity because I don't have my head in the UK tech space too much (I live here but virtually "work in the US", so maybe I'm part of the problem) but something smells funny about British culture when it comes to tech and I'd love to know what the cause of that smell is. The UK is certainly capable of great things. We've seen this in the biomedical, pharma, finance, and energy spaces – how can we be punching above our weight in sectors like those but still have most of our population flocking to American sites like Reddit, Facebook, and Instagram because the local alternatives either don't exist or are terrible?

klelatti 6y ago
I don't have easy answers - it's a complex issue and I don't think it's just about tech but about wider issues with British business in general (how many UK companies have tried and failed in the US?) Agreed on pharma but I'm not sure that there are many good examples of success stories outside of that space in e.g. finance. Just to point out that one reason why Arm was so successful early on was that it looked for business everywhere in the world. I think Robin Saxby spent incredible amounts of time in planes travelling on sales trips. I'm don't think that this is true for many UK companies and / or they are not very good at it. This insularity means that firms are in no position to compete with the scale of US firms when they move into the UK market. Edit: great interview with Robin Saxby, Arm's first CEO, talking about the early days of Arm here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FO5PsAY5aaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FO5PsAY5aaI

scruffyherder 6y ago

If arm wanted to stay in the uk they shouldn’t have sold themselves to the Japanese. The UK has always lagged in tech as they still think it’s the 1800’s and their domestic island is enough as they ignored the world in the 80s with low effort 3rd party sourcing at best. As usual the state TV and education could have dominated the English speaking world with BBC micros and education, but again they stayed on their tiny insignificant island. This whole thing is nothing more than sellers re-remorse for selling ARM for next to nothing. Go and do something new.