Peter Kyle, the Business Secretary, has said he would have intervened to block the sale of UK microchip company ARM Holdings had he been in government at the time. The firm, once considered the crown jewel of British technology, was bought by Japan's Softbank in 2016 before listing in New York in 2023.
Speaking during London Tech Week, Kyle told the BBC that ARM Holdings 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. The Cambridge-based firm had been listed in London until Softbank acquired it ten years ago for £24 billion. It is now valued at £285 billion on the New York Stock Exchange.
“Peter Kyle says he would have blocked ARM Holdings sale; regrets Google's DeepMind acquisition.”
Kyle also expressed regret over Google's acquisition of UK artificial intelligence pioneer Deep Mind in 2014. Although the company continues to operate in Britain, "the wealth that it has created is going elsewhere," he said.
His comments come as the government sets out how it would back British technology companies, at a time when US tech giants SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI are preparing for blockbuster share sales in New York. Kyle announced a number of initiatives designed to attract and keep fast-growing tech firms in the UK.
"We need to learn from these experiences," he 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 prepared to make bigger investments of taxpayer money in promising companies and create a cross-government concierge service to help firms get 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."
Recent public investments include energy software company Kraken, self-driving firm Wayve and a UK tech-focused investment fund Playground Global. However, 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 announcement that business rate rises for pubs would be phased in more gradually.