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Tech supplier Arm plans to hike prices, has considered developing its own chips

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan 13 (Reuters) - Arm Holdings, a technology supplier to chip firms, is developing a long-term strategy to hike prices by as much as 300% and has discussed designing its own chips in a move to compete with its biggest customers.

Known in its early stages as the "Picasso" project, Arm's plans, which date back to at least 2019, aim for a roughly $1 billion increase in annual smartphone revenue over about 10 years, according to sealed executive testimony.

Arm planned to achieve this partly by increasing the per-chip royalty rates that customers pay for ready-made parts of chip designs that used its latest computing architecture, called Armv9.

During the trial, documents were shown from August 2019 in which Arm executives discussed a 300% rate increase. In December 2019, Arm's then-CEO, Simon Segars, told Son, Arm's board chairman, that Arm had secured a deal with Qualcomm to use ready-made technology under the "Picasso" initiative.

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  • The plans Arm executives discussed included potentially inching closer to making a complete chip design of Arm's own, according to testimony and documents at trial. Arm sells chip-design blueprints, but most of its customers still spend months completing the chip design.

    "It was news to me that Arm is even thinking about (making its own chip)," said Tantra Analyst founder Prakash Sangam, who attended the trial. "It should send a chill down the spine of their customers."

    I wonder how competitive a fully ARM developed chip would be compared to say Qualcomm, Mediatek or Nvidia.