Arm is preparing to cut hundreds of employees from its global workforce after being forced to abandon its $40 billion sale to Nvidia last month. The Telegraph reports that the company’s chief executive Rene Haas told staff on Monday that between 12 and 15 percent of the company’s employees could be affected. This could translate to almost a thousand employees if, as The Guardian reports, Arm has over 6,500 employees worldwide. Arm says the majority of roles affected will be in its UK and US-based workforce.
“This is going to be a tough time for everyone, so I want to be clear on why we are doing this,” Haas said in an email seen by The Telegraph. “We need to be more disciplined about our costs and where we’re investing. To stay competitive, we need to remove duplication of work now that we are one Arm; stop work that is no longer critical to our future success; and think about how we get work done.”
The news comes a little over a month after parent-company Softbank said it was abandoning Arm’s sale to Nvidia in the face of “significant regulatory challenges.” The $40 billion deal was originally announced in late 2020, but Nvidia’s subsequent rise in stock price saw its value rise to as much as $80 billion last year, according to The Guardian. After abandoning the deal, which would have been one of the largest the semiconductor industry had ever seen, Softbank said it planned to take Arm public to cash in on the company.
Arm’s former CEO, Simon Segars, who led the company between 2013 and February 2022, warned that its current investment levels couldn’t continue if it went public rather than being acquired by Nvidia. Arm had sought to double its workforce after being bought by Softbank, according to The Telegraph.
“Like any business, Arm is continually reviewing its business plan to ensure the company has the right balance between opportunities and cost discipline,” the company told The Telegraph in a statement. “Unfortunately, this process includes proposed redundancies across Arm’s global workforce.”