ARM Gains Stronger Foothold In China With AI And IoT

China represents a huge opportunity for chip designer ARM as it looks to extend its low-power system-on-a-chip (SoC) architecture beyond the mobile and embedded devices spaces and into new areas, such as the datacenter and emerging markets like autonomous vehicles, drones and the Internet of Things. China is a massive, fast-growing market with tech companies – including such giants as Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent – looking to leverage such technologies as artificial intelligence to help expand their businesses deeper into the global market and turning to vendors like ARM that can help them fuel that growth. ARM Holdings, which designs SoCs and licenses those designs to third-party companies, has more than 1,000 such partners worldwide, including more than 200 in China alone, where over the past decade, the number of ARM-based chips shipped by Chinese partners has jumped 114-fold. The company has a dominant position in the mobile device market, with ARM-based chips powering the bulk of smartphones and tablets on the market around the globe. The rise of the IoT, the growth of hyperscale computing environments and the greater focus on energy efficiency in the datacenter has created opportunities for ARM to push beyond those mobile and embedded computing areas and rapidly grow its addressable market possibilities.