Arm
What Arm is up to now
No longer a pure rentier: shipped its first in-house chip in 35 years (the 'AGI CPU,' Mar-26, Meta launch customer) — now competing with its own licensees. Won the Qualcomm trial fight but is appealing, and the design-around threat got funded in the open: Qualcomm bought Ventana and chased Tenstorrent at $8-10B. Royalty growth stayed real (four straight >$1B quarters, v9+CSS) while SoftBank leaned on its 87.1% as loan collateral rather than selling. Stock -28% into the 07-29 print.
as of 2026-07-28
Sphere us
Pocket
Chips
SoftBank controls 87.1%. INVERSE profile — microscopic capital, planetary gravity (ISA under nearly all silicon).
The metrics
- Posture med
- expanding 1 src →
- Capital · available high
- ~$3.6B cash+STI (Q4 FY26, ended Mar 31 2026; cash $2.75B + ST inv $0.85B); net cash ~$3.2B (total debt $0.43B) — TINY vs its gravity 1 src →
- Capital · operating high
- ~$1.5B/yr operating cash flow (FY26); FCF ~$1.0B (FY26 $979M) 1 src →
- Capital · deployed high
- capex ~$0.55B (FY26); R&D-led up-stack push (CSS / compute subsystems, own-chiplet ambitions); no material buyback/dividend — capital allocation is SoftBank-directed 1 src →
- Capital · in high
- FY2026 revenue $4.92B (licensing + per-chip royalties); net income $904M 1 src →
- Capital · out high
- R&D + capex ~$0.55B; capital deployment is PARENT-DIRECTED (SoftBank 87.1%), so strategic outflows follow Son's allocation, not an independent Arm treasury 1 src →
- Optionality high
- constrained — 87.1% SoftBank-controlled; capital is parent-directed (Son), and the pile is microscopic vs the gravity it commands 1 src →
- Gravity med
- GROSS — the ISA under ~99% of smartphones + datacenter (Grace/Graviton) + auto/IoT; device value dependent on Arm designs ~$1T+/yr. INVERSE profile: tiny capital, planetary gravity. 2 src →
Projects & threads
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Arm Royalty Regime
authority claim
— open · last seen 2026-07-28
· 1 entries
Vocabulary