ARM to stop working with Huawei following imposition of US trade restrictions

Internal memos seen by the BBC indicate that ARM has ordered staff to stop working with Huawei

ARM has told staff to stop working with Huawei in order to comply with US regulations. That's according to the BBC, which claims to have seen internal memos warning staff to stop "all active contracts, support entitlements and any pending engagements" both with Huawei and its subsidiaries.

The disengagement is the latest response to the Executive Order issued on Thursday by President Trump, barring US companies from supplying Huawei without acquiring licences.

Over the weekend, a number of key US companies froze business relationships with Huawei, although Google formally relaxed its freeze after the Trump administration gave Huawei a 90-day stay of execution.

The memos obtained by the BBC indicate that ARM has instructed staff not to "provide support, delivery technology (whether software, code, or other updates), engage in technical discussions, or otherwise discuss technical matters with Huawei, HiSilicon or any of the other named entities".

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Even informal or casual contact with Huawei employees, such as at trade shows, should be avoided, the memos add.

Furthermore, it also applies to staff at ARM China, the company's China-based venture in which it sold a 51 per cent stake to a consortium of supposedly private investors in June last year. In reality, most of the entities involved in that transaction were backed, one way or another, by various Chinese government entities.

In a statement, ARM admitted that move, saying that it was "complying with all of the latest regulations set forth by the US government", but provided no further details. Staff were informed of the decision shortly after President Trump signed the Order.

HiSilicon, Huawei's wholly own fab-less semiconductor company, is heavily dependent on ARM technology, not just for the ARM-based Kirin systems-on-a-chip that power Huawei's smartphones, but also its Hi-series of server CPUs.

While the embargo won't affect its access to current technology and tools, it will affect the development of HiSilicon's next generation of products. That will almost certainly affect Huawei's ability to compete at the high end of the smartphone business - where the largest profit margins are to be found.

Huawei's statement issued this afternoon in response to the news was markedly more emollient than many of its recent pronouncements: "We value our close relationships with our partners, but recognise the pressure some of them are under, as a result of politically motivated decisions.

"We are confident this regrettable situation can be resolved and our priority remains to continue to deliver world-class technology and products to our customers around the world."

ARM licences its processor designs, instruction sets and other intellectual property to major chip makers and electronics companies around the world. It also sells tools to assist with design.

Its business model, worked out by its founding CEO Robin Saxby when the company was spun-out of Acorn Computers in the late 1990s, has made the ARM architecture the most widely used in the world; in particular, dominating mobile computing.

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