Arm Holdings PLC’s Chinese venture is appointing a local chip industry veteran as its new CEO, aiming to strengthen leadership to navigate the rapidly changing geopolitical and technological landscape.
Arm China plans to tap Chen Feng, a former executive at Fuzhou, Fujian Province-based chipmaker Rockchip Electronics Co, according to people familiar with the matter. The appointment will be made after this week’s Lunar New Year holiday, they said.
Liu Renchen and Eric Chen will resign their posts as co-CEOs, the people said. Fang Fenglei, founder of joint venture partner Hopu Investment Management Co, is Arm China’s chairman, one of the people said.
Chen Feng’s appointment closes the chapter to a tumultuous period for Arm’s China outpost. The new CEO will be in charge of helping the Cambridge, UK-based company adapt to a changing landscape as the prospect of cheaper artificial intelligence (AI) creates new tech winners and losers: Chinese start-up DeepSeek’s arrival as a serious contender to OpenAI and Meta Platforms Inc sparked a US$1 trillion rout on Monday. That threatens to upend assumptions in the lucrative datacenter market that the semiconductor designer is now targeting.
The two co-CEOs have served as interim leaders of Arm China since the 2022 ouster of former CEO Allen Wu, who was fired in 2020 for alleged conflicts of interest but refused to leave.
A leadership vacuum emerged, with the co-CEOs juggling commitments elsewhere, according to people familiar with Arm China’s operations. Liu is affiliated with the Research Institute of Tsinghua University in Shenzhen, while Eric Chen, who joined the board while a managing partner at the Softbank Vision Fund, is co-founder of ParityBit Technologies, one of the people said.
Given the limitations on the two co-CEOs’ time, the board appointed Chen Feng to be the sole, full-time CEO to help the joint venture better navigate the fast-paced technological and geopolitical shifts of the industry, two of the people said.
Arm, whose chip designs power most of the world’s smartphones, including Apple’s iPhone, finds itself at the heart of the US-China technological rivalry, which has led to US-imposed export restrictions on advanced AI chips. As tensions rise, Arm and other US companies operating in China face challenges, particularly with Beijing’s concerns over US President Donald Trump’s 'America First' policies and potential tariffs.
Majority-owned by Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp, Arm specializes in selling chip designs and licensing codes that enable software to interact with processors.