Arm Boss Rene Haas Hints at a Return to Its Roots with In-House Processor Designs

Cambridge-based SoftBank-owned Arm, the company behind the architecture that powers the vast majority of smartphones and a big chunk of the embedded ecosystem, may be looking to return to its roots and produce in-house hardware — after decades of licensing its intellectual property (IP) to third-party manufacturers like Apple, Broadcom, and Qualcomm.

"We are continuing to explore the possibility of moving beyond our current platform into additional compute to subsystems, chiplets, and potentially full end solutions," Arm chief executive officer Rene Haas told attendees on the company's Q1 2026 earnings call. "To ensure that these opportunities are executed successfully, we have accelerated the investment into our R&D [Research & Development]. These investments include expanding engineering delivery across multiple levels, adding to the already significant product investments we have made to date."

"Inside the company we have either insiders or access to all the expertise and technologies we would need to design, implement, and have a chiplet, for example, manufactured," Haas continued. "Personally, I appreciate the complexity of this, having lived this in multiple semiconductor companies in my career. And amongst the leadership team, we also have comprehensive experience in this area. So when we look at what's going on inside the market today, both in terms of the direction of travel of delivering complex chips, and ARM being the only compute platform that can provide a solution from the smallest devices to the largest data centers, milliwatts to megawatts, we're in a very unique space to provide solutions in a way that no one else can. And as a result, we're looking deeply at those possibilities."

Arm started life as a spin-off from Acorn Computers, with its name meaning Acorn RISC Machine — later Advanced RISC Machines and counting Apple and VLSI Technology as joint venture partners, and now simply Arm. Its first processor design was completed in-house, taking inspiration from the Berkeley RISC Project, and appeared on the market in the Acorn Archimedes family of microcomputers. The Archimedes' lack of commercial success outside the education market led to Acorn's downfall, but Arm quickly pivoted — moving away from producing its own chips and hardware products to licensing its intellectual property to third parties.

It's a move that proved a stellar success: chips based on Arm IP appear in the overwhelming majority of smartphones and tablets on the market today, and a big chunk of the embedded sector too. Licensees have seen less success trying to break into high-performance computing and the data center, but Arm is hoping the explosion of interest in machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML and AI) — which often relies on low-power serial processors to feed highly-parallel accelerators — could shift the balance in its favor.

To capitalize on this, though, could mean a return to its roots: Haas' reference to "full end solutions" suggests the company is considering producing in-house chip designs again, like in the days of the Acorn Archimedes — a move that would let the company capture a far larger slice of the profit pie, but would expose it to increased risk while also bringing it into direct competition with licensees like Apple, Broadcom, Qualcomm, and Samsung at a time when many are sniffing around the open source RISC-V instruction set architecture.

Aside from Haas' comments during the earnings call, though, Arm has yet to formally announce any roadmap to an in-house chip launch.