Rene Haas, head of the intellectual property group at Arm Holdings, spent much of Monday trying to reassure customers that the SoftBank-owned chip design company was not about to turn them into second-class citizens.
His efforts followed news the previous day that SoftBank had agreed to sell the UK company to Nvidia for up to $40bn, in what could end up as the semiconductor world’s biggest-ever deal.
The deal was tantamount to dropping a bomb in the middle of the chip industry. Companies that license Arm’s designs — which are used in most smartphone processors and many other devices that require chips with lower power consumption — are worried they will be “disadvantaged” once the UK group falls under the control of one of their competitors, Mr Haas admitted.