What's inside all of them
Your phone, your headset, your laptop and half the cloud run different chips. All of them pay the same company.
Apple designs its own chip. Qualcomm designs a rival. Amazon designs a third for its servers.
All three licence the same instruction set from Arm, in Cambridge, and pay a royalty on every chip that ships. Over 350 billion chips so far - $2.61bn of royalties last year.
Apple's licence runs beyond 2040. That term only became public in Arm's IPO filing.
The caveat: each line is one product, not everything that company buys. Outside the US, China and Japan the standard Galaxy S26 ships Samsung's Exynos - also Arm-based, so the middle row changes and the bottom one doesn't.
Arm sued Qualcomm over the cores it bought with Nuvia, and lost - jury verdict December 2024, case dismissed September 2025. The licence held.
New this year: Arm launched a server CPU of its own, with Meta as first customer. After 35 years of selling designs to everyone, it now competes with some of them.
Apple vs Qualcomm vs Amazon silicon: one company gets paid either way.
