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.

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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.

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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.

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[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.

> 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.