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Arm Holdings is the IP owner and developer of the Arm architecture, which is used in 99% of the world's smartphone CPU cores. Arm also has a high market share in other battery-powered devices, such as wearables, tablets, and sensors. Arm licenses its architecture for a fee, offering different license types depending on the flexibility the customer needs. Customers such as Apple or Qualcomm buy architectural licenses, which allow them to modify the architecture and add or remove instructions to tailor the chips to their specific needs. Other clients directly buy off-the-shelf designs from Arm. Both off-the-shelf and architectural customers pay a royalty fee per chip shipped. In 2026, Arm announced plans to launch its own CPU products on top of its existing royalty business.

Broadcom is one of the largest semiconductor companies in the world and has also expanded into infrastructure software. Its semiconductors primarily serve computing and networking, with custom AI accelerators now accounting for the bulk of the business. It is primarily a fabless designer, but holds some manufacturing in-house, such as for its best-of-breed film bulk acoustic resonator filters that sell into the Apple iPhone. In software, it sells virtualization, infrastructure, and security software to large enterprises, financial institutions, and governments. Broadcom is the product of consolidation. Its businesses are an amalgamation of former companies like legacy Broadcom and Avago Technologies in chips, as well as VMware, Brocade, CA Technologies, and Symantec in software.