The Business Secretary, Peter Kyle, has said he would have intervened to block the sale of British microchip company ARM Holdings to the Japanese firm Softbank had he been in government at the time. The company, once considered the crown jewel of UK tech, was bought for £24bn in 2016 and is now listed on the New York Stock Exchange with a valuation of £285bn. In an interview with the BBC, Kyle said ARM could have been the biggest firm on the London Stock Exchange and that “it would be 40% of the way there to the trillion-dollar company I think our country needs”.
His remarks came as the government set out a series of initiatives designed to attract and retain fast-growing technology companies in the UK, a push that coincides with blockbuster share sales in New York by US tech giants SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI. Kyle expressed regret over another lost opportunity: the acquisition of the pioneering UK AI company DeepMind by Google in 2014. “The wealth that it has created is going elsewhere,” he said, though DeepMind continues to operate in Britain.
“Business Secretary Peter Kyle says he would have vetoed ARM's sale to Softbank, calling it a missed opportunity for UK tech.”
“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.” To that end, the government is prepared to make larger investments of public money in promising companies and will create a cross-government concierge service to help them access skills, finance and support. “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.”
Recent investments include public money in energy software company Kraken, self-driving firm Wayve and a UK tech-focused investment fund, 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. The question now is whether the state’s new willingness to spend and take risks can prevent the next ARM from slipping away.