INTERVIEW: Arm CEO Simon Segars (pictured) revealed Masayoshi Son, his counterpart at parent SoftBank, does not interfere with his running of the UK chip technology company, while an alignment on strategy around artificial intelligence (AI) and IoT has made it easier to invest more aggressively post takeover.

Speaking about the £24 billion deal in an interview with Mobile World Live, Segars said SoftBank’s interest in acquiring Arm took it by surprise, but the potential to invest more, accelerate its roadmap and push its technology plans quicker meant the move made sense.

Some 18 months into the takeover, Segars said Arm had increased its workforce by 25 per cent, largely consisting of engineering hires, as it looks to develop its expertise around machine learning, its new IoT platform and “all sorts of technologies that 5G and advanced semiconductors is going to bring”.

To that end, Arm in February launched Project Trillium, a new machine learning-powered platform to provide advanced computing capabilities to connected devices.

Segars explained: “Looking at machine learning and what AI can bring for a long time, our conclusion is that data is obviously going to be gathered far from the data centres, far from the cloud.”

“And a lot of those are going to be processed locally at the edge, so we have been looking at the world of AI, the world of machine learning, from a point of view of what happens at the edge.”

Since the interview, which was conducted at this year’s Mobile World Congress, rumours emerged SoftBank could relist Arm in the long-term.

To hear more about Project Trillium and Segars’ thoughts on 5G, click here.