Tech company Arm plans nearly 1,000 layoffs after deal with Nvidia collapses

March 15 (UPI) -- Arm, the British company that licenses its chip designs and software platforms used in most smartphones, said Monday that it plans to eliminate nearly 1,000 jobs following the collapse of its deal with Nvidia.

The cuts will impact 12% to 15% of Arm's employees worldwide, with most losses in the Britain and the United States, according to Rene Haas, who became CEO last month.

"Like any business, Arm is continually reviewing its business plan to ensure the company has the right balance between opportunities and cost discipline," a spokesperson for Arm told CNBC on Tuesday. "Unfortunately, this process includes proposed redundancies across Arm's global workforce."

Softbank Group of Japan acquired Arm in 2016 in a $32 billion cash deal. In 2020, Nvidia and Softbank announced an agreement for the sale of Arm in a deal valued at $40 billion.

But the transaction was rejected by regulatory agencies, including the Federal Trade Commission, which in December filed a law enforcement action to block the acquisition.

"The proposed vertical deal would give one of the largest chip companies control over the computing technology and designs that rival firms rely on to develop their own competing chips," the FTC said in a news release in early December.

According to its website, Arm's energy-efficient processor designs and software platforms have enabled advanced computing in more than 215 billion chips and its technologies securely power products from the sensor to the smartphone and the supercomputer.

In 2020, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that the company was replacing its Intel chips with Arm designs.