Chipmaker Arm to Cut Up to 15% of Workforce After Nvidia Deal Crumbles

British chip designer Arm is cutting up to 15 percent of its workforce, just a month after a $40 billion USD takeover from chipmaker Nvidia collapsed.

Arm CEO Rene Haas, who only joined the company in February this year, told staff on Monday that between 12 percent to 15 percent of staff will be made redundant as a result of the cuts, according to an internal memo seen by Bloomberg.

Arm employs 6,400 people worldwide, meaning between 768 and 960 jobs could be cut, primarily to UK- and US-based employees. The chip designer intends to cut as many as 1,000 jobs, but most cuts will not affect engineers, according to the report.

Since Arm is currently a private company, it is hard to say how layoffs can improve its cost structure, but normally companies try to make their structures leaner ahead of an IPO.

Arm neither confirmed nor denied its intentions to lay off as many as 1000 people, but it confirmed that it needs to align its headcount with market opportunities and challenges.

“Like any business, Arm is continually reviewing its business plan to ensure the company has the right balance between opportunities and cost discipline,” the company said in a statement. “Unfortunately, this process includes proposed redundancies across Arm’s global workforce.”

It is noteworthy that Arm is planning to reduce its headcount as its rivals from x86 camp — AMD and Intel — are hiring. Just several weeks ago it transpired that Intel began to build a new GPU development team in the UK. Potentially, this unit could hire specialists from Arm and Imagination Technologies.

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