Additionally, a significant portion of Arm's China, US, and India engineering and product leadership has left to work on RISC-V startups and companies now.

That said, I can see Arm being leveraged by other Softbank owned companies like Ampere (which they already do) and Graphcore, with an eventual merger of all 3 into some form of a mega-corp due to operational overlaps and efficiencies, but this would be defensive in nature given the degree to which the industry has aligned with funding a RISC-V ecosystem and how RISC-V's governance and leadership consists of major players and leaders in the chip design space.

Edit: Can't reply

> It is also a bad look when they sue Qualcomm for selling chips in a way that Arm does not like.

That's why Qualcomm is also betting on RISC-V as well after acquiring Ventana [6] and is participating in India's DeepTech initiative [7], which has been targeting RISC-V startups as well as Renesas [8] in Japan+India taping out a 3nm RISC-V processor for automotive and IoT usecases. And also why FuriosaAI in SK has been working on RISC-V, as well as the multitude of fabless players in China.

It's the same thing that happened with IBM POWER vs x86 decades ago with an added sovereignty component.

[0] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260213PD208/arm-risc-v-com...

[1] - https://www.cas.cn/cm/202601/t20260126_5097208.shtml

[2] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260216VL205.html

[3] - https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleseDetailm.aspx?PRID=2224839&...

[4] - https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1820621&re...

[5] - https://m.blog.naver.com/nanambook/223316051806

[6] - https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2025/12/qualcomm-acqu...

[7] - https://idtalliance.org/

[8] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20250923VL201/renesas-3nm-re...

Not all ARM use cases need that, but it would be a huge mistake to not develop integrated options.

And also an opportunity to make adjustments to their business model.

No, they capture exactly the value they create.

As a long time (40 years) subscriber to The Economist, I expect better of them.

Keep on doing IPR focussed design.

Grow deeper roots into a foundry, work on integration of the tech into FPGA and big chip/platter stuff for AI.

If AI tanks, the work will find a value point. We all want more memory and more execution cycles per clock tick be they on one ALU or many.

Lots of work to come in optical related areas. ARM has green fields to dig, beyond the instruction set.