Apple and ARM have signed an agreement that will span 20 years and is expected to cost the Cupertino giant tens of billions of dollars. Crucial for Apple, this contract will allow it to use ARM technology for many more years.
You probably won’t hear much about it, and yet Apple and the British designer of ARM microarchitectures have signed an essential contract for the future of the American giant, and the continuity of its activity. This agreement will indeed allow Apple to continue to use the technologies developed by ARM, and this for another twenty years.
In this case, and as Reuters reports, the terms of the contract ” extend beyond 2040 “, but Apple will have to pay a real fortune to ARM to take advantage of this re-engagement: 52 billion dollars according to ARM’s estimates. If this figure turns out to be correct, then it would be the largest sum paid for a deal of this type this year in the United States.
Apple and ARM: an old, solid… and central partnership
The reason for this massive investment is not secret: ARM owns the intellectual property of the computer architecture used by most smartphones in the world. Intellectual property that it licenses to Apple and many other market players. In the case of Apple, this license allows it to develop in-house the “A” chips of its various iPhones, but also the “M” processors of its Macs, MacBooks and iPads, among others. Without this license, the firm would therefore be totally paralyzed.
Note, however, that the risk of a disagreement between Apple and ARM is low. The ties that unite the two companies are particularly strong and long-standing. Indeed, they date back more than 30 years and to the very creation of ARM. Apple was thus one of the first firms to join forces to found ARM in 1990. ARM.
Apple is also one of the companies that recently invested (to the tune of $735 million) in Arm’s IPO. The Cupertino giant is even one of the strategic investors who agreed to buy ARM shares from the start, Reuters has also discovered.
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