(Bloomberg) -- Arm Holdings Plc’s Chinese venture is appointing a local chip veteran to be its new chief executive officer, seeking to consolidate leadership to better navigate fast-paced geopolitical and technological shifts.
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Arm China plans to tap Chen Feng, a former executive at Fuzhou, Fujian-based chipmaker Rockchip Electronics Co., according to people familiar with the matter. The appointment will be made after this week’s Lunar New Year holidays, they said, asking not to be named discussing private information.
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, 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 AI creates new tech winners and losers: Chinese startup DeepSeek’s arrival as a serious contender to OpenAI and Meta Platforms Inc. sparked a $1 trillion rout this week. 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 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.
A representative of Arm declined to comment.
Arm — whose chip designs are used in most of the world’s smartphones including Apple Inc.’s iPhone — is on the front lines of a US-China technological rivalry that’s resulted in US-led export curbs on the most advanced AI chips. Arm and other US businesses operating in China are grappling with growing tensions as Beijing warily eyes President Donald Trump’s “America First” policies and his threats of more tariffs.