Maybe they're greedy or maybe they see the long game is that their architecture licensing business is in serious jeopardy from RISCV. So, if you can't beat em, join em.
Maybe they'll eventually make their own RV core designs too.
AMD has CPU, GPU, NPU, FPGA, NIC, DPU... They seem well positioned. The Arm ecosystem has everything you could want but Arm themselves are taking some time to create their in-house CPU and TPU.
That's good news. A system for customers (and themselves) to conveniently tightly mix and match all those computing modes is a great competitive/value move.
I'm not sure I buy Arm's argument. It is hard to describe the degree to which policymakers in China [0][1], India [2][3][4], and South Korea [5] are all heavily promoting RISC-V in order to reduce vendor dependency as well as build their own competitive and domestic design ecosystems.
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.
---
Edit 2: After thinking some more, I think a case could be made for Arm to survive but not thrive in the same manner as Minitel continued to kick around for so long due to France's stress on technological sovereignty. Long term, I think RISC-V will eat a large portion of Arm's commodity and embedded computing market share, but Arm (and moreso Softbank) is attempting to position itself as critical to British [9], Malaysian [10] (they remain a major semiconductor hub), and even Indian [11] attempts at design sovereignty.
I can see a British-Japanese alignment around eventually merging Softbank properties like Arm, Graphcore, Ampere, and Rapidus into a British-Japanese version of Intel such that Graphcore+Ampere leverage Arm's ISA for HPC and Embedded/Telecom usecases respectively and Rapidus becomes their foundry.
Additionally, I can see the Japanese government pushing it's players to heavily leverage Arm as well - especially given that all the major players in Japan already cooperate, have an ownership stake in, or are partially owned by Softbank.
Orthogonal question for Dang or someone who knows -
Do downvotes, account flaggings, and/or high posting volumes trigger this? I run into it frequently whenever I get downvotes. I almost never used to get this before 2022 or so.
I have experienced this issue some time too - I think if you post some "controversial" comment (judged by many quick upvotes and downvotes) it triggers a "cooling down" period before you can post a reply to your immediate child comments in the thread (or it could be mod-triggered). This ensures you don't dominate the thread, and allows a conversation with other participants to develop. Based on how others react to the comments, I assume it also gives the mods a better idea if they need to intervene. I found it a minor annoyance at first, but have learnt to appreciate it - thoughtful comments (with careful moderation) from a diverse group of people is what makes a community like this valuable.
https://archive.is/wrKvv
Porque no los dos?
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.
ARM's failed lawsuit with Qualcomm revealed these same ambitions, albeit in a much more negative light: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42475228
After following that drama, it's difficult to see ARM as anything but a greedy profiteer.
Maybe they're greedy or maybe they see the long game is that their architecture licensing business is in serious jeopardy from RISCV. So, if you can't beat em, join em.
Maybe they'll eventually make their own RV core designs too.
>Yet Arm’s current model captures only a sliver of the value it creates.
No, they capture exactly the value they create.
As a long time (40 years) subscriber to The Economist, I expect better of them.
Do you really think it’s equal or are you contesting the value creation/capture dichotomy writ large?
I think both
Analogous to discussion 3 days ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46994869#46995258
We're fast approaching 1 trillion Arm CPUs manufactured - because it was a good design for a good price.
No doubt unprecedented for something so complex to be produced in such volume. I predict that nothing else will ever achieve such scale.
I am curious how AMD sees themselves staying relevant in the value chain as compute is increasingly about cpu cores working with npu cores.
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.
AMD has CPU, GPU, NPU, FPGA, NIC, DPU... They seem well positioned. The Arm ecosystem has everything you could want but Arm themselves are taking some time to create their in-house CPU and TPU.
That's good news. A system for customers (and themselves) to conveniently tightly mix and match all those computing modes is a great competitive/value move.
I'm not sure I buy Arm's argument. It is hard to describe the degree to which policymakers in China [0][1], India [2][3][4], and South Korea [5] are all heavily promoting RISC-V in order to reduce vendor dependency as well as build their own competitive and domestic design ecosystems.
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.
---
Edit 2: After thinking some more, I think a case could be made for Arm to survive but not thrive in the same manner as Minitel continued to kick around for so long due to France's stress on technological sovereignty. Long term, I think RISC-V will eat a large portion of Arm's commodity and embedded computing market share, but Arm (and moreso Softbank) is attempting to position itself as critical to British [9], Malaysian [10] (they remain a major semiconductor hub), and even Indian [11] attempts at design sovereignty.
I can see a British-Japanese alignment around eventually merging Softbank properties like Arm, Graphcore, Ampere, and Rapidus into a British-Japanese version of Intel such that Graphcore+Ampere leverage Arm's ISA for HPC and Embedded/Telecom usecases respectively and Rapidus becomes their foundry.
Additionally, I can see the Japanese government pushing it's players to heavily leverage Arm as well - especially given that all the major players in Japan already cooperate, have an ownership stake in, or are partially owned by Softbank.
---
[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...
[9] - https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/building-a-sovere...
[10] - https://newsroom.arm.com/blog/arm-malaysia-silicon-vision
[11] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20250918VL202/arm-design-chi...
It is also a bad look when they sue Qualcomm for selling chips in a way that Arm does not like.
Qualcomm was trying to cheat Arm out of license fees that Nuvia agreed to.
Qualcomm won in court, so that doesn't seem to be the case.
Qualcomm acquired talented designers and put them to work, not their existing (further encumbered) designs.
> Edit: Can't reply
Orthogonal question for Dang or someone who knows -
Do downvotes, account flaggings, and/or high posting volumes trigger this? I run into it frequently whenever I get downvotes. I almost never used to get this before 2022 or so.
I have experienced this issue some time too - I think if you post some "controversial" comment (judged by many quick upvotes and downvotes) it triggers a "cooling down" period before you can post a reply to your immediate child comments in the thread (or it could be mod-triggered). This ensures you don't dominate the thread, and allows a conversation with other participants to develop. Based on how others react to the comments, I assume it also gives the mods a better idea if they need to intervene. I found it a minor annoyance at first, but have learnt to appreciate it - thoughtful comments (with careful moderation) from a diverse group of people is what makes a community like this valuable.