Arm Holdings vs Berkshire Hathaway Inc.: Strategic Comparison

This in-depth comparison examines Arm Holdings and Berkshire Hathaway Inc. across revenue, market value, business model, competitive positioning, and long-term growth strategy. Whether you are researching Arm Holdings on its own, evaluating Berkshire Hathaway Inc., or weighing the two companies side by side, the breakdown below highlights where each company leads and where the gap between Arm Holdings and Berkshire Hathaway Inc. is widest.

On the headline numbers, Arm Holdings reports annual revenue of $4.9B against $371.4B for Berkshire Hathaway Inc., while their respective market capitalizations stand at $309.4B and $1.07T. Arm Holdings is headquartered in United Kingdom and Berkshire Hathaway Inc. in United States, and those different home markets shape how each company competes.

Arm Holdings: Arm, based in Cambridge in the UK, designs processor architectures but does not manufacture chips. It writes the instruction set and core designs that other companies build on. Chips based on Arm designs power the iPhone, Samsung Galaxy phones, Apple's Mac computers and the Amazon Kindle, and the architecture is used in almost every smartphone because of its power efficiency.

Berkshire Hathaway Inc.: Berkshire Hathaway does not make a single product under its own name. It owns insurers (GEICO, General Re, National Indemnity, Alleghany), the BNSF railroad, Berkshire Hathaway Energy's regulated utilities and pipelines, manufacturers such as Precision Castparts, Lubrizol, Marmon and OxyChem, distributors such as McLane and Pilot, and consumer businesses such as See's Candies and Dairy Queen. On top of that sits an equity portfolio worth $297.8 billion at the end of 2025, whose five largest positions, American Express, Apple, Bank of America, Coca-Cola and Chevron, accounted for 65% of its value. About 387,800 people worked for Berkshire's businesses at the end of 2025, roughly 80% of them in the United States.

Arm Holdings and Berkshire Hathaway Inc. pursue distinct approaches to generating revenue, and understanding how each company operates is the foundation of any fair comparison between Arm Holdings and Berkshire Hathaway Inc..

Arm Holdings business model: Arm licenses intellectual property. It spends heavily on R&D to design power-efficient processor architectures, then licenses the designs to companies such as Apple, Qualcomm and Samsung, which customize them and have them manufactured by a foundry such as TSMC. Arm charges an upfront license fee and an ongoing royalty on each chip shipped. In fiscal 2026 royalty revenue was $2,613 million and license and other revenue was $2,307 million.

Berkshire Hathaway Inc. business model: Berkshire's business model is capital allocation on top of a decentralized group of operating companies. Subsidiary managers run their own businesses, with no corporate budget submissions and no committee structure at headquarters, and send surplus cash to Omaha. The chief executive then decides where it goes: into existing operations, new acquisitions such as the $9.7 billion purchase of OxyChem completed in January 2026, marketable equities, or Berkshire stock when it trades below estimated intrinsic value. Insurance is the core. Policyholder money held before claims are paid, which Berkshire calls float, reached $176 billion at the end of 2025, and the group has earned a pre-tax underwriting profit in each of the three years to 2025, so that float has cost less than nothing. Berkshire has not paid a dividend since 1967, which is why retained earnings and float, rather than outside capital, fund almost everything it buys.

The durability of a company's moat often decides long-term winners. Here is how the competitive advantages of Arm Holdings stack up against those of Berkshire Hathaway Inc..

Arm Holdings competitive advantage: Arm's moat is the software built around its architecture. iOS, Android and millions of mobile apps are written for the Arm instruction set, so a rival architecture such as Intel's x86 would need developers to rework that software to enter smartphones. Decades of focus on power efficiency, which extends battery life, also give Arm a technical lead in mobile.

Berkshire Hathaway Inc. competitive advantage: Berkshire's advantages are permanent capital, a balance sheet that stays liquid by design, and a reputation that brings sellers to it. It held $369.0 billion of cash, cash equivalents and Treasury Bills in its insurance and other businesses at the end of 2025 and carries limited debt, which is why it could supply capital to Goldman Sachs, General Electric and other companies during the 2008 crisis on terms no one else was offering. Owners of private businesses who care where their companies end up sell to Berkshire for the same reason: Bell Laboratories came to Berkshire in 2025 because its chief executive wrote to Buffett on behalf of the founder's daughters. Subsidiary managers also keep real autonomy, with no corporate budgets to submit and no quarterly earnings pressure.

Future prospects matter as much as current results. The growth strategies below explain how Arm Holdings and Berkshire Hathaway Inc. each plan to expand from here.

Arm Holdings growth strategy: With more than 99% of mobile application processors already on its architecture, Arm is pushing into markets where the chip value per unit is higher. Neoverse designs target cloud and AI infrastructure and are the basis of Amazon Graviton, Google Axion, Microsoft Cobalt and Nvidia Grace; Arm says data center royalties more than doubled in fiscal 2026. Compute Subsystems, pre-integrated blocks rather than single cores, raise the content Arm sells per design, and in March 2026 Arm went further and began selling finished silicon with the AGI CPU for AI data centers. In automotive, Arm licenses safety-capable cores for infotainment and driver assistance, where its share is highest, and the platform families introduced in 2025, Neoverse for infrastructure, Niva for PCs, Lumex for mobile, Zena for automotive and Orbis for IoT, are how it packages that work for each market.

Berkshire Hathaway Inc. growth strategy: Berkshire's size limits what can move its results, so growth comes from large purchases, reinvestment inside existing businesses and buying back its own stock. Buffett described the 2009 BNSF agreement, a $34 billion investment in the railroad, as an all-in wager on the economic future of the United States. The 2025 and 2026 examples are smaller: a $9.7 billion purchase of Occidental's chemicals business, OxyChem, and the family-owned pest-control manufacturer Bell Laboratories. Abel has said Berkshire will buy productive businesses in preference to holding Treasuries, but will not stretch on price, which is why cash and Treasury holdings still exceeded $370 billion at the end of 2025 and no shares were repurchased that year. Berkshire also adds to listed holdings when prices suit it, paying $16.9 billion for equity securities during 2025.

A closer look at the financial trajectory of Arm Holdings and Berkshire Hathaway Inc. rounds out the comparison.

Arm Holdings: Arm makes nearly all of its gross profit from intellectual property, so its cost of sales is small: fiscal 2026 revenue of $4,920 million produced $4,799 million of gross profit, a margin above 97%. Revenue comes in two lines. License and other revenue, $2,307 million in fiscal 2026 and up 25%, is charged upfront or across milestones when a customer takes access to Arm designs. Royalty revenue, $2,613 million and up 21%, is collected per chip once partners ship, which makes it a long tail from designs licensed years earlier. Spending is concentrated in engineering: research and development cost $2,776 million in fiscal 2026, about 56% of revenue, which held operating income to $900 million and net income to $904 million. Arm ended the year with $2,751 million of cash and cash equivalents plus $850 million of short-term investments, and $2,071 million of remaining performance obligations, about 28% of which it expects to recognise as revenue within twelve months. The most recent reported quarter, the three months to June 30, 2026, was a record: revenue rose 22% year over year to $1.29 billion on record first-quarter royalty and licensing revenue, with data center royalties again more than doubling.

Berkshire Hathaway Inc.: Berkshire reported 2025 revenue of $371.444 billion, operating earnings of $44.486 billion (down from $47.437 billion in 2024 and above the five-year average of about $37.5 billion), and net earnings attributable to shareholders of $66.968 billion. GAAP net earnings swing with the equity portfolio: 2025 included $30.737 billion of after-tax investment gains and $8.255 billion of after-tax impairments on Kraft Heinz and Occidental. The businesses produced $46 billion of net cash from operating activities. Insurance earned $9.460 billion of pre-tax underwriting profit, with GEICO contributing $6.824 billion, and insurance float grew to $176 billion from $171 billion a year earlier. Shareholders' equity ended 2025 at $717.4 billion, up $68.1 billion, and the insurance and other businesses held $369.0 billion of cash, cash equivalents and US Treasury Bills. Berkshire repurchased no stock in 2025 and has paid no dividend since 1967.