Business Secretary Peter Kyle has said he would have intervened to block the sale of UK microchip company ARM Holdings had he been in government at the time, as the government sets out a fresh push to back British technology companies.
Speaking during London Tech Week, Kyle told the BBC that ARM – bought by Japanese firm Softbank in 2016 and listed in New York in 2023 – could have become the biggest company on the London Stock Exchange. “It would be 40% of the way there to the trillion-dollar company I think our country needs,” he said. The Cambridge-based firm was bought for £24bn ten years ago and is now worth £285bn.
“Business Secretary Peter Kyle says he would have blocked the foreign sale of ARM Holdings had he been in power.”
Kyle also expressed regret over the acquisition of pioneering UK AI company DeepMind by Google in 2014. “The wealth that it has created is going elsewhere,” he said, even though the company continues to operate in the UK.
His comments come as the government outlines how it would support domestic tech firms, with US giants SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI preparing for blockbuster share sales in New York. “We need to learn from these experiences,” Kyle said. “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.”
The Business Secretary said the government was ready to make bigger investments of taxpayer money in promising companies and launch a cross-government concierge service to help firms access skills, finance and support. “I've upped the risk threshold,” he added. “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.”
Recent public investments include energy software company Kraken, self-driving firm Wayve and a UK tech-focused investment fund Playground Global. But Kyle acknowledged that other sectors, particularly hospitality, are struggling because of 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.