Which company acquired the mobile-chip designer Arm in 2016 for $32 billion?

SoftBank Group acquired the mobile-chip designer Arm in 2016 for $32 billion.

SoftBank announced the acquisition of Arm Holdings in July 2016, agreeing to pay approximately $32 billion in cash. The deal made Arm a wholly owned subsidiary of SoftBank and gave the Japanese technology-investment group control of one of the most influential processor-architecture companies.

Arm licenses processor designs and instruction-set technology to semiconductor companies rather than generally manufacturing finished chips. Its architecture became especially important in smartphones and embedded devices because of its performance and power-efficiency characteristics. Arm later expanded strongly into servers, personal computers, and artificial-intelligence applications.

Nvidia announced a proposed acquisition of Arm in 2020, but regulators raised major competition concerns and the transaction was abandoned in 2022. Arm was subsequently floated publicly in 2023. That later history can cause confusion, but SoftBank was the company that completed the 2016 purchase.