UK chip designer Arm confirmed media reports, kicked off by The Telegraph, that it intends to axe up to 1,000 jobs. The majority will be in the UK and the US.

As reported by the Financial Times (paywall applies), Arm has 6,400 staff worldwide with over half (3,500) located in the UK.

"Like any business, Arm is continually reviewing its business plan to ensure the company has the right balance between opportunities and cost discipline. Unfortunately, this process includes proposed redundancies across Arm’s global workforce," said Arm in a statement.

Rene Haas, recently appointed as Arm CEO, evidently wants the company to be leaner and meaner ahead of an IPO, which is slated to happen within SoftBank’s fiscal year ended March 31, 2023. SoftBank, Arm’s owners, aims to list the firm on Nasdaq.

The workforce-trimming announcement comes fairly quickly on the heels of regulators kiboshing SoftBank’s planned $66 billion sale to Nvidia on competition and security grounds.

As pointed out by the Financial Times, as part of SoftBank’s deal to acquire Arm for £24bn in 2016, the UK Takeover Panel said it would have to double its UK headcount over a five-year period (1,600 at the time). That requirement expired last year.

New broom

Since his appointment as Arm CEO in February, replacing Simon Segars, semiconductor industry veteran Haas has prompted exec-level changes.

Chief legal counsel Carolyn Herzog, chief strategy officer Jason Zajac and CTO Dipesh Patel – as reported by the Financial Times – are all stepping down.

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Haas has climbed up the greasy pole at Arm, joining the company in 2013 and promoted to president of the Arm IP Products Group in 2017.

Before joining Arm, Haas’s various product and engineering roles included a seven-year stint at Nvidia as vice president and general manager of its computing products business.

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— Ken Wieland, contributing editor, special to Light Reading