Business Secretary Peter Kyle has said he would have vetoed the sale of UK microchip company ARM Holdings had he been in government at the time – a move that would have kept one of Britain’s most valuable technology assets on home soil.
The Cambridge-based firm, once considered the crown jewel of UK tech, was bought by Japanese conglomerate Softbank in 2016 for £24bn and later listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2023. It is now worth £285bn.
“Business Secretary Peter Kyle says he would have vetoed the sale of UK microchip company ARM Holdings if in power.”
Kyle told the BBC that ARM could have become the biggest company on the London Stock Exchange if it had stayed. “It would be 40% of the way there to the trillion-dollar company I think our country needs,” he said.
His comments came during London Tech Week as the government set out a series of initiatives designed to attract and retain fast-growing technology companies. Kyle also expressed regret over the 2014 acquisition of UK-based artificial intelligence pioneer DeepMind by Google, noting that although the company still operates in Britain, “the wealth that it has created is going elsewhere.”
“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 Business Secretary announced that the government is prepared to make bigger investments of taxpayer money in promising companies and create a cross-government concierge service to help firms secure the skills, finance and support they need.
“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 recently announced substantial public investments in energy software company Kraken, self-driving firm Wayve and a UK tech-focused investment fund, Playground Global.
But while tech firms may be enjoying government help, Kyle acknowledged that other sectors are struggling – particularly hospitality, which has seen 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 recent announcement that business rate rises for pubs would be phased in more gradually than originally planned.