Peter Kyle, the Business Secretary, has said he would have blocked the sale of British microchip company ARM Holdings to Japanese firm Softbank in 2016 had he been in government at the time. His comments come as the government sets out a raft of initiatives designed to prevent other promising companies from leaving the UK.
ARM, once considered the crown jewel of British technology, was bought for £24bn almost a decade ago. It is now listed on the New York Stock Exchange with a market value of £285bn. Kyle told the BBC that if ARM had stayed in London it could have been the largest company on the stock exchange, and “it would be 40% of the way there to the trillion-dollar company I think our country needs”.
“Peter Kyle says he would have blocked ARM's sale to Softbank as government unveils plans to keep UK tech firms.”
The Business Secretary also expressed regret over Google’s 2014 acquisition of UK-based AI pioneer DeepMind. Although the company continues to operate in Britain, Kyle said “the wealth that it has created is going elsewhere”. Speaking during London Tech Week, he announced a series of measures aimed at attracting and retaining fast-growing technology firms.
Among them is a cross-government concierge service to help companies secure the skills, finance and support they need, as well as a willingness to make bigger investments of taxpayer money in promising startups. “I’ve upped the risk threshold,” Kyle said. “There are two risks. The first is that we get so slowed down by caution and anxiety about AI that we don’t embrace and shape it. The other risk is that we embrace and shape it and get some things wrong – I choose to take the latter.”
The government has already committed public money to energy software firm Kraken, self-driving company Wayve, and a UK tech-focused investment fund called Playground Global. But Kyle acknowledged that other sectors are struggling, particularly hospitality, which has faced sharp rises in the national living wage and employers’ national insurance contributions. “Hospitality is stressed and I understand that,” he said, pointing to the government’s decision to phase in business rate rises for pubs more gradually than originally planned.
“We need to learn from these experiences,” Kyle added. “Now, what I don’t want to do is be interventionist in a way that I’m just using the powers I have to block: what I do want to do is create the circumstances where they do not want to leave in the first place.”
With US tech giants SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI preparing for blockbuster share sales in New York, the question remains whether the government’s new approach will be enough to keep Britain’s next generation of technology champions at home.