Arm Holdings vs NVIDIA: Founders, CEOs and History

Company facts

Founders

CEOs and their tenures

Timeline: Arm Holdings and NVIDIA side by side

1. 1985Arm Holdings

   ARM1 Processor First Silicon

   The first ARM processor, ARM1, reached silicon at Acorn Computers, designed by Sophie Wilson, who wrote the instruction set, and Steve Furber, who led the hardware.

2. 1990Arm Holdings

   Arm Founded as an Acorn, Apple and VLSI Joint Venture

   The company was incorporated in November 1990 as Widelogic Limited and renamed Advanced RISC Machines Limited on December 3, 1990, structured as a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple Computer and VLSI Technology.

3. 1993Arm Holdings

   Apple Newton Ships with ARM610 and Arm Turns Profitable

   Apple launched the Newton MessagePad, powered by an ARM610 processor, the first significant consumer product built on an ARM-based chip.

4. 1993NVIDIA

   Founding in Santa Clara

   Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem founded NVIDIA on April 5, 1993, with a focus on 3D graphics for gaming and multimedia. The founding set the company on a parallel-processing path long before AI infrastructure became the main market.

5. 1998Arm Holdings

   Dual Listing on the London Stock Exchange and Nasdaq

   Arm floated on April 17, 1998, trading in London and New York on the same day after being priced at 575p a share by Morgan Stanley Dean Witter and Cazenove. The company was renamed ARM Holdings at the listing and joined the FTSE 100.

6. 1999NVIDIA

   GPU Category Defined

   NVIDIA introduced the graphics processing unit concept in 1999. The milestone mattered because it framed graphics hardware as a specialized processor, a technical idea that later carried into accelerated computing and AI workloads.

7. 2001Arm Holdings

   Warren East Becomes Chief Executive

   Warren East was appointed chief executive in October 2001, succeeding Robin Saxby. Over the following twelve years Arm established the Cortex CPU and Mali GPU families and became the standard architecture for smartphones.

8. 2004Arm Holdings

   Artisan Components Acquired for $913 Million

   Arm bought Artisan Components, a designer of physical IP such as standard cell libraries, memory compilers and input and output cells, extending Arm from processor designs into the foundry-specific building blocks needed to fabricate a chip.

9. 2006NVIDIA

   CUDA Opens GPUs to General Computing

   CUDA opened GPU parallel processing to scientists, researchers, and developers outside graphics. It became the software foundation that made NVIDIA hardware useful for machine learning, simulation, and other compute-heavy workloads.

10. 2007Arm Holdings

    iPhone Launch Accelerates Smartphone Royalty Growth

    Apple launched the original iPhone with a Samsung-manufactured application processor built on an ARM11 core.

11. 2012NVIDIA

    AlexNet Shows GPU Value for Deep Learning

    The AlexNet breakthrough used NVIDIA GPUs to win the ImageNet competition. The event helped convince researchers and engineers that GPUs could accelerate neural-network training at a scale CPUs could not match.

12. 2013Arm Holdings

    Simon Segars Succeeds Warren East as CEO

    Arm announced in March 2013 that Warren East would retire and that president Simon Segars, who joined Arm in 1991 as one of its early engineers, would become chief executive from July 1, 2013.

13. 2016Arm Holdings

    SoftBank Acquires Arm for ~$32.1 billion (24.3 Billion Pounds)

    SoftBank Group agreed on July 18, 2016 to acquire Arm Holdings for 24.3 billion pounds, about $31.4 billion in cash, and completed the deal on September 5, 2016.

14. 2016NVIDIA

    DGX-1 AI Supercomputer

    Nvidia introduced the DGX-1 deep-learning supercomputer in 2016, its first system built specifically for artificial intelligence.

15. 2018NVIDIA

    RTX Brings Real-Time Ray Tracing to Graphics

    NVIDIA RTX brought real-time ray tracing into the company's graphics roadmap. The product line kept gaming and professional visualization tied to AI-enhanced rendering while Data Center was becoming more important.

16. 2020Arm Holdings

    Nvidia Agrees to Buy Arm for $40 Billion

    Nvidia announced an agreement to acquire Arm from SoftBank for about $40 billion in cash and stock.

17. 2020NVIDIA

    Mellanox Acquisition Adds Networking

    NVIDIA completed the Mellanox acquisition for about $7 billion. The deal mattered because large AI and high-performance-computing clusters depend on fast networking between accelerators, not only on individual GPU speed.

18. 2022Arm Holdings

    Nvidia Deal Collapses and Rene Haas Becomes CEO

    Nvidia and SoftBank terminated the acquisition in February 2022 after the U.S. Federal Trade Commission sued to block it, the UK Competition and Markets Authority recommended against it and EU regulators opened a Phase II review.

19. 2022NVIDIA

    Arm Acquisition Terminated

    NVIDIA and SoftBank terminated the proposed Arm acquisition because of significant regulatory challenges. The failed deal showed how closely governments watch control points in semiconductor architecture.

20. 2022NVIDIA

    Hopper H100 Announced

    Nvidia announced the Hopper-architecture H100 data-center GPU in March 2022.

21. 2023Arm Holdings

    Nasdaq IPO Prices at $51 and Raises $4.87 Billion

    Arm listed on Nasdaq on September 14, 2023 under the ticker ARM, pricing American depositary shares at $51 and raising about $4.87 billion at a valuation of roughly $54.5 billion. It was the largest U.S.

22. 2023NVIDIA

    Grace CPU Enters Data Center Roadmap

    NVIDIA introduced its first data-center CPU, Grace, for large-scale AI and high-performance computing. The milestone expanded the platform from GPUs and networking into CPU-GPU system design.

23. 2024Arm Holdings

    Fiscal 2024 Revenue Reaches $3.23 Billion

    Arm reported fiscal 2024 revenue of $3,233 million, up 21%, made up of $1,802 million of royalty revenue and $1,431 million of license and other revenue, with net income of $306 million.

24. 2024NVIDIA

    Blackwell Architecture Launched

    NVIDIA launched Blackwell as a data-center-scale architecture combining GPUs, CPUs, DPUs, interconnects, switch chips, systems, and networking adapters. The architecture became central to FY2026 Data Center demand.

25. 2025Arm Holdings

    Artisan Foundation IP Business Sold to Cadence

    Arm completed the sale of its Artisan foundation IP business, the standard cell libraries, memory compilers and general-purpose input and output blocks it had built up since the 2004 Artisan acquisition, to Cadence Design Systems on August 26, 2025 under an ag…

26. 2025Arm Holdings

    Lumex Client Platform Launched for On-Device AI

    In September 2025 Arm launched Lumex, its compute subsystem platform for flagship smartphones and next-generation PCs, pairing C1 CPUs and G1 GPUs with Scalable Matrix Extension version 2 for on-device AI.

27. 2025Arm Holdings

    Fiscal 2025 Revenue Passes $4 Billion

    Arm reported fiscal 2025 revenue of $4,007 million, up 24%, with royalty revenue of $2,168 million and license and other revenue of $1,839 million, and net income of $792 million.

28. 2026Arm Holdings

    Arm Launches the AGI CPU, Its First Production Silicon

    At the Arm Everywhere event in San Francisco on March 24, 2026, Arm introduced the Arm AGI CPU, the first chip it designed and sells as finished silicon rather than licensable IP.

29. 2026Arm Holdings

    Fiscal 2026 Revenue Reaches $4.92 Billion

    Arm reported fiscal 2026 revenue of $4,920 million, up 23% and a third consecutive year of growth above 20% since the IPO, with royalty revenue of $2,613 million, license and other revenue of $2,307 million and net income of $904 million.

30. 2026NVIDIA

    $215.9B FY2026 Revenue

    NVIDIA reported $215.9 billion of FY2026 revenue, $193.7 billion of Data Center revenue, and $120.1 billion of net income. The result showed how far AI infrastructure had moved the company beyond its original PC graphics market.

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