UK chip software company ARM says it will keep working with Chinese partners

The China operation of British chip software firm ARM said on Wednesday it would continue to supply Chinese partners, a move that takes some of the pressure off a growing number of companies including Huawei Technologies, which are restricted from purchasing vital US semiconductor technology.

Allen Wu, chief executive of ARM China, said the company would keep licensing its technologies and providing service support to Chinese customers after an assessment by its legal department concluded that both its v8 and v9 architecture – blueprints that phone companies and chip makers use to design processors to power smartphones and other devices – are UK-origin technologies.

He stressed that ARM is the only non-US platform, with all the other computing architectures available on the market being of US-origin, according to a sina.com report.

In a statement issued after the report, ARM said it has several IP platforms that are of US origin but the company has determined that its ArmvA-8 architecture and the next-generation of that architecture are of UK-origin.

ARM China’s commitment will be seen as much needed reassurance to China’s tech sector, which has become a flashpoint in the US-China relationship. Amid ongoing trade tensions between the world’s two top economies, Washington has punished some of China’s biggest and most promising tech companies by adding them to the Entity List, which bars them from purchasing US technology without approval.

In early October, Washington expanded the Entity List to include some of China’s top AI companies, which were accused of helping the ruling Communist Party mistreat Uygur Muslims and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities, which followed a similar move by Washington in May against Huawei Technologies as part of ongoing US efforts to limit the influence of the Chinese telecoms leader over national security concerns.