Please note that the following is not investment advice. This post may be too long for your email client so please read in your browser by clicking on the title. ‘We’ll make chips over my dead body.’ Robin Saxby, ARM Founding CEO It’s one of the things that Arm is most famous for: it’s a chip company that doesn’t make chips. A stance that has been a key part of Arm’s strategy since it was articulated by Robin Saxby in 1991 and that has remained in place for more than three decades. Of course, many companies now leave the actual making of chips these days to foundries like TSMC, an approach that Arm helped to pioneer; what Saxby really implied, and what has made Arm distinctive, is that Arm wouldn’t sell chips to end customers. The rationale is explained in the Arm history Culture Won: Robin felt that the only way to satisfy all their ambitions was to make the ARM processor a global RISC standard by collaborating with semiconductor companies in all the major chip markets worldwide. The key rule was to not compete with your customers or, as Robin is widely quoted as saying for many years: “make chips over my dead body.” The chosen way forward was partnership – to create long-term business relationships with silicon manufacturers and end-users for mutual benefit. (my highlighting) Saxby himself mentions his famous quote in his interview with Charbax from 2017 But then, on 24 March, that all changed when Arm announced its new Arm AGI CPU. Today, Arm is announcing the Arm AGI CPU, a new class of production-ready silicon built on the Arm Neoverse platform and designed to power the next generation of AI infrastructure. For the first time in our more than 35-year history, Arm is delivering its own silicon products – extending the Arm Neoverse platform beyond IP and Arm Compute Subsystems (CSS) to give customers greater choice in how they deploy Arm compute – from building custom silicon to integrating platform-level solutions or deploying Arm-designed processors. Arm even...