FTC investigates Arm antitrust over semiconductor licensing

Arm Holdings is facing a new United States antitrust investigation into its semiconductor licensing practices, according to people familiar with the matter, as the Federal Trade Commission reviews whether the company is restricting access to technology used to build central processing units.

The FTC is probing whether Arm will refuse or lower the quality of licenses for blueprint-style instruction-set technology while it expands efforts to develop its own chips, the people said. The regulator notified Arm earlier this year and instructed the company to preserve internal documents as the review got under way. An FTC spokesperson declined to comment, and Arm did not comment on the probe.

Arm, majority-owned by SoftBank, has historically operated as a supplier of chip designs and licensing for the instruction-set technology that connects software to processors. Companies including Qualcomm and major device makers such as Apple rely on those licenses for products across smartphones and other computing devices. Arm has also increasingly moved closer to manufacturing and, in March 2026, launched an artificial intelligence-focused CPU aimed at data centers, a shift that some customers...