ARM

Arm Holdings is a British semiconductor intellectual-property company that designs processor architectures and licenses them to chip manufacturers worldwide, rather than fabricating silicon itself.

Arm's instruction-set architectures power the vast majority of the world's smartphones and embedded devices, making it one of the most pervasive computing platforms ever created. Its business model — collecting royalties and licensing fees from manufacturers who build their own chips on Arm designs — gives it unusual leverage across the entire semiconductor industry.

In the AI era, Arm has become increasingly central to data-center and inference computing. Major chip companies, including Nvidia, have adopted Arm-based processor designs for server CPUs, and Arm has publicly aligned with the view that agentic AI represents the next major computing workload. As AI investment cycles drive renewed enthusiasm for semiconductor stocks, Arm is consistently grouped among the bellwether names investors watch as proxies for the broader AI hardware buildout.