Q & A - Rene Haas

Arm's CEO on how his hardware is supporting the Fourth Industrial Revolution

- BY CHARLIE CAMPBELL

It's been a good run for Arm, the chip and software company you lead: your market cap has risen 2.5 times since your September 2023 IPO. Where do you see future growth coming from? We have two components to the business model: licensing to get access to our technology, and then customers pay us a royalty. Some chips have one Arm microprocessor; some have hundreds, meaning we collect a much more significant royalty. And because every digital device is based on Arm, it's a very healthy and highly sustainable growth driver.

Yes, your company estimates that 99% of “premium smartphones” run on Arm central processing units (CPUs). What is it about Arm's architecture that makes it so indispensable? The CPU not only runs the operating system—Android, iOS—but it needs to run all the applications, whether that's Excel, Power-Point, WhatsApp, Gmail. That software has all been tailored to run on Arm at inception, and converting to another CPU is just an enormous task. So that's what keeps us sticky—it's just running all that software.