Arm CEO Rene Haas said U.S. export restrictions on chip shipments to China could slow overall progress in technology and negatively impact both the industry and consumers, he said in an interview with Bloomberg at the Founders Forum Global conference in Oxford.
"If you narrow access to to technology and you force other ecosystems to grow up, it’s not good. It makes the pie smaller, if you will. And frankly, it’s not very good for consumers," Haas said, adding that Arm's presence in China is "quite significant."
Arm has joined the criticism from NVIDIA, which has already cost the company about $8 billion in export restrictions. In April, the Trump administration effectively blocked the export of server processors to China, leaving NVIDIA without access to one of its largest markets. Previously, the company's CEO Jensen Huang warned that the restrictions were not restraining China, but only encouraging competitors, including Huawei, to accelerate the development of their own technologies.
Despite the fierce competition between the companies, Arm and NVIDIA have close technical ties — Arm processors are paired with NVIDIA GPUs for AI workloads, including in the Grace Blackwell platform. Rene Haas called Huang a "very tough competitor," but said he sees good prospects for Arm as it expands its reach into more markets, from data centers to headphones.
"We the only company that can address AI — whether it’s training and inference in the data center or inference and running something in as small as earbuds. That’s a difficult place for Nvidia," Haas said.
He also said he has spent more time in Washington in the past year than in his entire career. He said the current administration "has a lot of smart people connected to the industry," and Arm wants its voice to be heard.
These statements have been accompanied by signs of a possible easing of restrictions: according to US Commerce Secretary Howard Latnick, some technological bans may be reviewed in exchange for the resumption of supplies of critical metals from China. President Trump announced that a new trade agreement had been reached between the parties.