Peter Kyle says he would block Arm Holdings sale
Business Secretary peter kyle said he would have blocked the 2016 sale of Arm Holdings to Softbank if he had been in government at the time. He said the Cambridge-based chip designer could instead have become far larger in Britain, and used the remarks to press for policies that keep fast-growing technology companies from leaving.
Arm Holdings and Peter Kyle
Kyle said Arm, which was bought by the Japanese company Softbank for £24 billion ($32 billion), could have become “40% of the way there to the trillion-dollar company I think our country needs.” Arm was listed in New York in 2023 and is now worth £285 billion, according to the figures he cited. He said it had once been listed on the London Stock Exchange.
The case matters because Arm is no small asset. Kyle said the company would have been the biggest firm on the London Stock Exchange if it had stayed, making its relocation a symbol of what Britain lost when a major technology group moved abroad.
DeepMind and Google
Kyle also said he regretted that the UK-based AI company DeepMind was acquired by Google in 2014. He said DeepMind still operates in the UK, but added that “the wealth that it has created is going elsewhere.”
That comment sits alongside his argument that the government should do more than block deals after the fact. “We need to learn from these experiences,” he said during London Tech Week.
London Tech Week plans
During the event, Kyle said the government does not want to be “interventionist in a way that I'm just using the powers I have to block” deals. Instead, he said it wants to create conditions in which companies do not leave in the first place, and has “upped the risk threshold” to back that approach.
The government announced initiatives during London Tech Week to attract and keep fast-growing technology companies in the UK, including bigger taxpayer-backed investments in promising firms and a cross-government concierge service for skills, finance and support. It has recently put public money into Kraken, Wayve and Playground Global.
Kyle’s comments point to a policy shift from stopping sales late to trying to keep ownership, investment and the gains from growth inside the UK from the start.
