The Licence That Lapsed: What a Student’s RISC-V Project Says About ARM’s Teeth

A lapsed university licence suggests ARM's weakness is friction, not price. ARM offers free academic access, but it needs signed agreements, renewals and export control checks. RISC V needs none of that, so students with no switching costs default to it, and those habits can carry into industry later.

A follow up to The ARM That Grew Teeth, four months on

Early this morning a Masters student in electrical engineering in Taipei, Matthew Exon, posted a short note on the fediverse that has been rattling around in my head all day. His SoC lecturer had told the class that the university’s ARM licence had expired, so for the first time the final year project would be built on RISC-V instead. His verdict was blunt: “ARM is toast.” In a follow up he made the more interesting argument, which is that GCC and Linux did not become ubiquitous because they were the best tools available, but because they were what you built your proof of concept with when you could not afford anything serious, and by the time funding arrived the deadline was too short to change toolchains. He added that his first job in 1999 involved integrating a system onto UnixWare for Telstra, while colleagues down the corridor were experimenting with the company’s first Linux projects, and that was the last time he ever saw a proprietary Unix in the wild.

In June I wrote that ARM had traded thirty five years of neutrality for a larger share of the value it enabled, and that the market was underwriting execution before execution existed. A single university letting a licence lapse is an anecdote, not a data point, and I want to be careful not to build a thesis on it. But it is a very well chosen anecdote, because it sits exactly where ARM’s new strategy is weakest: at the bottom of the funnel, among people who have no switching costs yet. So this post does three things. It looks at what actually changed for ARM between June and October, it takes Matthew’s proprietary Unix argument seriously and tests where it holds and where it breaks, and it asks what any of this means for those of us who buy compute rather than design it.

1. What “the licence expired” probably means

The first thing worth saying is that this almost certainly was not about money. ARM runs a programme called Arm Academic Access that gives accredited universities commercial grade ARM IP, tools, models and training material at no cost for non commercial research and teaching, including manufacture of experimental silicon in runs of up to a thousand units. On paper, a university that wants to teach SoC design on ARM can do so for free.

The catch is in how that access is granted. ARM describes the programme as a standardised institutional agreement that the university’s legal department signs through DocuSign, after which access can be extended across research groups, and it warns that the process typically takes anywhere from a few weeks to a couple of months depending on the institution. Participation is also subject to export control, sanctions and technology access rules, which is not a trivial consideration for a university (Matthew’s profile places him in Taipei) teaching an international cohort holding a variety of passports. None of this is unreasonable for a company protecting valuable IP. It is simply friction, and friction is a contract with an end date, a renewal cycle and a legal sign off that someone has to chase.

RISC-V has none of that. There is nothing to renew because there was never anything to sign. When the licence lapsed, whether through an administrative oversight, a budget cycle or a deliberate decision, the lecturer’s path of least resistance was not to chase the paperwork but to switch to the architecture that cannot lapse. That is the real story in Matthew’s post, and it is a story about asymmetric friction rather than asymmetric cost.

Anyone who has spent time building on FPGAs, as I have for most of my career, will recognise the pattern. The first soft core you drop into a design is usually the one with the least paperwork attached, and once it is wired into your build, your test benches and your team’s muscle memory, it tends to stay there long after the reasons for choosing it have been forgotten.

2. The proprietary Unix argument, taken seriously

Matthew’s analogy deserves more than a shrug, because it describes a real mechanism. Technology standards are often decided not by which option is best but by which option is cheapest to start with, at the moment when the person making the choice has no budget and no deadline pressure. By the time money and deadlines arrive, the cheap option is load bearing.

flowchart LR
    A[Student project<br/>no budget, no deadline] --> B[Proof of concept<br/>uses what the team knows]
    B --> C[Funded product<br/>deadline too short to switch]
    C --> D[Installed base<br/>toolchain is now load bearing]
    D --> E[Hiring pipeline<br/>graduates know the same stack]
    E --> A
    X[Licence friction:<br/>contracts, renewals,<br/>export controls] -. pushes away at .-> A

The evidence that this funnel is already tilting is stronger than a single lecturer in Taipei. Stanford redesigned its CS107E systems course for the 2023 to 2024 year around RISC-V single board computers, replacing the Raspberry Pi boards (and therefore ARM) that it had used before. Berkeley’s foundational CS 61C machine structures course is taught on RISC-V using the RISC-V edition of the Patterson and Hennessy textbook. The Czech Technical University in Prague moved its computer architectures course to RISC-V alongside a switch of its open source simulator, and a 2025 Masters thesis at Charles University evaluated a transition of its operating systems course from MIPS to RISC-V and found no meaningful difference in student experience between the two, recommending a full switch. Most of these moves were away from MIPS rather than away from ARM, which matters, but they establish RISC-V as the default teaching ISA for a generation of engineers.

The most telling signal, though, comes from the company most associated with teaching people to program on ARM. Raspberry Pi’s RP2350 microcontroller, which ships on the five dollar Pico 2, contains both a pair of ARM Cortex-M33 cores and a pair of open hardware Hazard3 RISC-V cores, selectable in software or by programming on chip OTP memory. Hazard3 was designed by Luke Wren, one of Raspberry Pi’s own ASIC engineers, in his spare time. When the most popular educational hardware platform in the world puts an open core designed as a side project next to a licensed ARM core and lets students choose at boot, the asymmetry in the funnel is no longer hypothetical.

So the mechanism Matthew describes is real. Where the analogy gets weaker is in what happens further down the funnel, and that is the subject of the rest of this post.

3. Four months of teeth: what changed since June

In June the AGI CPU was a launch announcement, a set of specifications and an aggressive revenue target. Since then ARM has started turning the announcement into silicon, and the picture is mixed in ways that are instructive.

On the engineering side, ARM used Hot Chips in August to fill in much of the architecture. The chip is built from two chiplets on TSMC’s N3P process, each physically containing seventy Neoverse V3 cores of which four are held in reserve to improve yield, joined by a 2 TB/s UCIe link, with memory and I/O on the same die rather than split across separate chiplets in the way AMD, Intel and NVIDIA do it. ARM said the processor works as planned and remains on track for commercial shipments in late 2026, but it still has not published conventional benchmarks, relying on its estimate of roughly twice the performance per rack versus x86 platforms. The point I made in June about that claim needing independent anchoring still stands.

On the commercial side, the news is better than I expected. ARM’s first quarter of fiscal 2027, reported on 29 July, delivered record revenue of $1.29 billion, up 22 percent year over year, with royalties of $715 million and licensing of $574 million, and data centre royalties more than doubling. ARM said demand for the AGI CPU had passed $2 billion, more than double its original estimate for fiscal 2027 and 2028, and that initial product had been delivered to multiple customers. Two caveats sit inside those numbers. Of the $574 million licensing figure, $193 million came from ARM’s technology licensing and design services agreement with SoftBank, its own parent. And ARM acknowledged supply constraints across wafers, substrates, testing and memory, confirming that it had secured capacity for the original $1 billion opportunity but not yet for the upside.

That supply question is exactly what the market has fixated on. ARM’s 52 week high of $452.70 was set on 18 June, three days before my original post. On 15 October the stock closed at $244.79, roughly 46 percent below that peak. Some of that is sector wide: chip stocks sold off on reports about OpenAI’s revenue and again on a hot US inflation print, and a long duration growth stock is acutely sensitive to rate expectations. But Artisan’s developing world fund, explaining why ARM had been a drag on its third quarter, specifically cited questions about the company’s ability to meet demand for its own chip. That is the execution risk I flagged in June, now being priced in real time.

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I would not read the drawdown as a verdict on the strategy. Demand above $2 billion for a first generation product is a real signal. What the drawdown does show is how little patience the market has for a company that has asked to be valued as a silicon business while still learning to be one.

4. The Qualcomm verdict: neutrality on trial

The most important development since June did not happen in a fab. It happened in a courtroom in Wilmington, Delaware, this week.

On 13 October a federal jury found that ARM had breached its architecture licence agreement with Qualcomm by failing to provide software patches and tools for its designs, and that ARM had intentionally interfered with Qualcomm’s business relationship with Meta. The interference claim centred on a 2024 letter in which ARM told Qualcomm it was in breach and threatened to terminate its licence; Qualcomm alleged ARM leaked that letter to Bloomberg while Qualcomm was negotiating a chip deal with Meta, and told the jury the deal lost $170 million in value as a result. ARM’s counsel argued the deal changed because Meta shifted from virtual reality headsets toward AI glasses. The jury found for ARM on five other breach allegations and awarded Qualcomm nominal damages of $2.

Both companies claimed victory, and on the money both are right. But the $2 figure is not where the risk sits. Qualcomm’s licence agreement contains a clause that it argues allows it to stop paying royalties for five years if ARM is found in breach, and Judge Maryellen Noreika has not yet ruled on whether that clause is enforceable; ARM argues it is not. A separate bench trial heard this month will decide whether ARM is negotiating in good faith over the next version of its architecture for Qualcomm, whose current licence runs until 2033. Either ruling could matter far more than the jury’s damages award.

This sits on top of the regulatory exposure I described in June. The FTC opened its antitrust investigation in May, examining whether ARM might reject or downgrade licences for rivals while building its own chip business, and it follows antitrust complaints Qualcomm filed in 2025 with the FTC, the European Commission and Korea’s Fair Trade Commission, the last of which has already searched ARM’s Seoul offices.

I want to be precise about what the verdict does and does not establish. It does not prove that ARM disadvantages licensees in order to help its own chips; the leak happened in 2024, well before the AGI CPU was announced, and the FTC investigation is independent of the trial. What it does establish, as a finding of fact by a jury, is that ARM was willing to intentionally interfere with a licensee’s commercial relationship with a third party during a licensing dispute. And that third party, Meta, is now the joint development partner for ARM’s own data centre CPU. If you are a chip company deciding which ISA to bet a ten year roadmap on, you do not need to believe ARM will misbehave. You only need to believe it has demonstrated the capacity to, at a time when it competes with you for the same customers. That is precisely the trust that neutrality used to buy, and it is what the teeth have cost.

5. Where RISC-V actually is in late 2026

None of this matters unless there is somewhere credible to go, so it is worth being honest about the state of the alternative, because the RISC-V community has a habit of quoting its most flattering numbers.

The volume story is real but concentrated at the low end. The SHD Group estimates that RISC-V SoC unit shipments reached roughly 6.9 billion in 2025, up 37 percent, and forecasts 35.9 billion units and $318 billion in device revenue by 2031. You will also see a figure of 25 percent market share quoted widely this year; RISC-V International itself has noted it is unclear whether that refers to all microprocessors or only the segments where RISC-V already has traction, so I would not lean on it. The honest summary is that RISC-V has won a large share of embedded controllers, many of them invisible. NVIDIA is the best example: it has been replacing its proprietary Falcon microcontrollers with RISC-V cores since 2015 and was expected to ship around a billion of them in 2024, with somewhere between ten and forty inside every GPU it sells.

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Further up the stack the movement is newer and more fragile. NVIDIA announced in July 2025 that CUDA would support RISC-V as the host processor in an AI system, a role previously limited to x86 and ARM, and by August this year SiFive was demonstrating CUDA and RHEL 10 running on its BigSky rack mount development server, built around 32 of its P870-D cores. SiFive raised $400 million in April at a $3.65 billion valuation, explicitly to push its IP into data centre CPUs, and its chief executive said hyperscalers had told the company it was time to accelerate open standard alternatives. Alibaba’s T-Head unveiled the XuanTie C950 in March, a 5nm server part reportedly running at 3.2GHz and positioned for agentic AI, and in May announced that its XuanTie 9 series had become the first RVA23 compliant processor to run Android 16.

The two largest corporate bets come with caveats that matter. Meta acquired Rivos, a RISC-V AI chip startup, in late 2025 to accelerate its MTIA accelerator roadmap, but The Information has since reported that the integration has been far from smooth. Qualcomm acquired Ventana Micro Systems, one of the strongest RISC-V server CPU designers, in December 2025, a move widely read as a hedge against ARM; but at least one well regarded analyst, Ian Cutress, has argued the deal was more about adding engineers to Qualcomm’s ARM based Oryon team than about shipping RISC-V servers, pointing out that Qualcomm’s own announcement framed it that way.

And there is a sobering counterpoint from the market most motivated to abandon ARM. In China, where RISC-V has state backing and is viewed as geopolitically neutral, China Mobile reportedly gave ARM based servers a 65 percent share in one recent centralised procurement round, the highest ever recorded for a telecom carrier. Even where the political will exists, the software ecosystem still tilts the decision toward ARM.

6. Why “ARM is toast” is wrong, at least for now

Matthew’s conclusion overreaches, and it is worth being clear about why, because the reasons tell you what to watch.

The proprietary Unix vendors that Linux displaced were selling expensive, fragmented, mutually incompatible systems into a market that was moving to cheap commodity hardware. ARM is in almost the opposite position. Its revenue is at record levels, its royalty rates are rising as customers adopt Armv9 and its Compute Subsystems, and its installed base includes essentially every smartphone, Apple’s entire product line, and the custom server chips at AWS, Google, Microsoft and NVIDIA. The switching cost for those customers is not a licence; it is decades of compiled binaries, tuned libraries, security certifications and engineer experience. A university switching its final year project does not move any of that.

RISC-V also still has to prove that its own openness does not become fragmentation. The RVA23 profile, which pins down the set of extensions an application processor must support so that operating systems and binaries can target it reliably, is what finally makes a coherent Android and Linux story possible. But it is recent, and Google’s decision in 2024 to pull RISC-V from the Android generic kernel image, citing the pace of change, is a reminder of how easily that story can stall.

So the analogy holds for the entry funnel and fails for the installed base, and the honest answer is that the funnel takes a decade to reach the installed base. The students choosing RISC-V for their final year projects in 2026 will be the senior engineers choosing architectures for new products in the early 2030s. That is roughly the horizon over which ARM has asked investors to believe in $15 billion of silicon revenue. The two timelines are on a collision course, and ARM’s conduct toward its licensees in the meantime will decide which way the funnel tilts when they meet.

7. What this means for those of us who buy compute

For most enterprises the ISA question is abstracted away by the cloud, and it should stay that way. But there are three practical lessons here that apply well beyond chips.

1️⃣ Watch for suppliers who start competing with their customers. ARM’s story is a textbook case of a platform provider moving up the stack into its customers’ markets. It happens in cloud, in core banking platforms, in payments and in SaaS. The question to ask of any strategic supplier is not whether they behave well today but whether their incentives still align with yours, and what your contract allows them to do when they stop aligning.

2️⃣ Price friction, not just cost. The lapsed licence in Taipei was free. What lost the decision was the paperwork. When you evaluate a platform, count the renewals, the legal reviews, the export classifications and the audit rights, because those are what make teams quietly route around a supplier.

3️⃣ Keep architecture optionality cheap. You do not need to deploy anything on RISC-V to benefit from its existence. You just need to make sure your build pipeline would let you if the economics changed. If you already build for amd64 and arm64, checking whether your containers will also build for riscv64 costs almost nothing and tells you how locked in you really are.

cat > check-multiarch.sh << 'EOF'
#!/usr/bin/env bash
# Checks whether a Dockerfile builds cleanly for amd64, arm64 and riscv64.
# Requires Docker with buildx and QEMU binfmt emulation installed.
set -euo pipefail

IMAGE_NAME="${1:-multiarch-check}"
CONTEXT="${2:-.}"
PLATFORMS=("linux/amd64" "linux/arm64" "linux/riscv64")

docker run --privileged --rm tonistiigi/binfmt --install all > /dev/null
docker buildx create --use --name multiarch-check > /dev/null 2>&1 || docker buildx use multiarch-check

for platform in "${PLATFORMS[@]}"; do
  echo "Building for ${platform}..."
  if docker buildx build --platform "${platform}" -t "${IMAGE_NAME}:${platform//\//-}" "${CONTEXT}" > "build-${platform//\//-}.log" 2>&1; then
    echo "  OK"
  else
    echo "  FAILED (see build-${platform//\//-}.log)"
  fi
done
EOF
chmod +x check-multiarch.sh

Expect riscv64 to fail more often than the other two, usually because a base image or a binary dependency does not publish a RISC-V build yet. The list of failures is the useful output: it is a precise inventory of where your lock in actually lives.

8. The leading indicator

In June I argued that ARM had chosen to become a combatant, and that the price of that choice would be paid in trust. Four months later the evidence is accumulating on both sides of the ledger. The commercial demand for ARM’s own silicon is stronger than I expected. The supply chain, the share price and a Delaware jury have all reminded the market that becoming a combatant has costs that a neutral licensor never had to carry.

Matthew’s lecturer is not going to move ARM’s royalty line this year or next. But students are the only population in the semiconductor industry with zero switching costs, which makes them the purest signal of where the default is drifting when nobody has a reason to stay. Linux did not beat proprietary Unix in the data centre in 1999. It beat it in the computer labs and spare bedrooms a decade earlier, and the data centre followed. ARM still has time to make sure the same thing does not happen to it, and the cheapest way to do that is the thing it gave up in March: being the company everyone trusts not to compete with them.

References