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Critical node· Silicon · Critical anchor
Arm, Cambridge
Cambridge, United Kingdom52.18°N 0.17°E
computed criticality18/100
reading
≈99% of smartphone processors derive from the Arm architecture
2024Fault line
About 99% of smartphone processors derive from an architecture designed in Cambridge. Arm makes nothing: it collects a royalty on every chip, a near-universal toll on mobile computing now extended to the datacenter. Owned by SoftBank, this chokepoint is also a geopolitical asset, a single instruction set under a single jurisdiction.
Actors
Arm Holdings (Cambridge)
SoftBank (Tokyo)
Feeds 1
Nvidia, Santa ClaraCompute↗Sources