What is being described as “the heist of the century” is striking fear into every banker and parasite bloating himself on the financial flows of the failing neoliberal world order and the so-called global economy:
Arm is widely regarded as the most important semiconductor IP firm. Their IP ships in billions of new chips every year from phones, cars, microcontrollers, Amazon servers, and even Intel’s latest IPU. Originally it was a British owned and headquartered company, but SoftBank acquired the firm in 2016. They proceeded to plow money into Arm Limited to develop deep pushes into the internet of things, automotive, and server. Part of their push was also to go hard into China and become the dominant CPU supplier in all segments of the market.
As part of the emphasis on the Chinese market, SoftBank succumbed to pressure and formed a joint venture. In the new joint venture, Arm Limited, the SoftBank subsidiary sold a 51% stake of the company to a consortium of Chinese investors for paltry $775M. This venture has the exclusive right to distribute Arm’s IP within China. Within 2 years, the venture went rogue. Technically it has always been legally independent, but Arm still maintained control. Recently, Arm China gave a presentation to the industry about rebranding their own IP, extending it by developing more, and emphasizing that they are striking their own independently operated path.
This firm is called “安谋科技”, but it is not part of Arm Limited.
This is the tech heist of the century….
Despite formally being fired, Allen Wu has remained in power. He ousted executives that were loyal to Arm. He has even hired security paid for by Arm China that reports to him. This security has kept Arm out of the Arm China offices. Allen Wu has aggressively taken over the firm and is operating it how he sees fit. One interesting tidbit is that Allen Wu sued Arm China in order to declare his dismissal illegal. He essentially sued himself as he represented both sides in that specific court case.
Arm has halted the transfer of any IP to entities on export control list. According to Arm, no IP has been stolen. Simultaneously, Arm has also tried to appeal to the government stating that this is bad for the Chinese semiconductor industry.
This leads us to the present day, where Arm China held an event at which they formally declared their independence. They proclaimed that 安谋科技 is China’s largest CPU IP supplier. It was born from Arm, but is an independently operate, Chinese owned company.
This is a fascinating situation, because the gunboat diplomacy to which the multinational corporations have appealed for the last 120 years is simply not an option in this case. There is absolutely nothing that the ARM investors or Softbank or its bankers can do if China decides that it wants to keep ARM China in the hands of the Chinese individuals who presently control it.
Demonstrating, once more, the profound difference between influence and power.