On the same day England’s greediest football clubs were brought to heel by the threat of government intervention against their European Super League cartel, the Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden blocked the planned sale of Cambridgeshire silicon chip designer Arm to US chip manufacturer Nvidia. Unsurprisingly, the football story overshadowed a squabble over the arcane business of semiconductors, but it represents another dramatic break with past economic policy, and one with global implications as the trade and tech war between the US and China builds once more.
Arm is a novelty: a homegrown British technology success story that is now a genuine world leader. A spin-off from Acorn Computers, whose BBC Micro became a familiar sight in 1980s schools as a result of a Thatcher government purchasing scheme, Arm was an early designer of innovative, low-power consumption silicon chips. Its business model was a similarly radical departure from industry conventional wisdom: eschewing the construction of silicon fabrication plants (a phenomenally expensive and complex undertaking), Arm proposed not to make chips, but only to sell their designs, for a royalty fee. The gamble paid off spectacularly, with low-power chip architecture proving critical to the development of mobile phone technology. Arm chip designs now sit in more than 95 per cent of smartphones worldwide.
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