Season 4, Episode 2: ARM & SoftBank

**David Rosenthal** (0:00)
Because I mean, what's cool is like, it is literally the ARM 610 that was developed with Apple for the Apple Newton is the core of all the ARM processors.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:23)
Welcome to season four, episode two of Acquired, the podcast about technology, acquisitions and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:31)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:33)
And we are your hosts. Today, we are going to explore a topic that has flown relatively under the radar, despite being the primary component of every single one of our phones, SoftBank's $32 billion purchase of the British-based ARM Holdings. For folks that listened to the previous episode that we did on SoftBank, you know they were once a Japanese telecom and multinational conglomerate now that has a close to $100 billion fund. That they have created massive disruption in the startup landscape. And here we are diving into kind of the deal that started it all and with just an essential piece of technology that we all use every single day. Listeners, you know that a few months ago, we started our Limited Partner Program for folks to go deeper on technology, startups and VC topics with us. David, I wanted to say that I'm particularly pumped where we landed in our last episode on investment theses on ambient computing and processing happening everywhere as sort of the next enormous technology wave. So I think it's super relevant to this episode and we will find out why as we dig in. So if you're interested or you just want to support the show and like what we do, you should click the link in the show notes to consider becoming a prestigious Acquired Limited Partner or go to kimberlite.fm.acquired. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (2:01)
So Crusoe, as listeners know by now, is a clean compute cloud provider specifically built for AI workloads. NVIDIA is one of their major partners and literally Crusoe's data centers are nothing but racks and racks of A100s and H100s. And because Crusoe's cloud is purpose-built for AI and run on wasted, stranded or clean energy, they can provide significantly better performance per dollar than traditional cloud providers.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:27)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (2:32)
The other element that makes Crusoe special is the environmental angle. Crusoe, of course, locates their data centers at stranded energy sites. So think oil flares, wind farms that can't use all the energy they generate, etc. And uses that power that would otherwise be wasted to run your AI workloads instead.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:51)
Obviously, it's a huge benefit for the environment and for customers on costs since Crusoe doesn't rely on the energy grid. Energy is the second largest cost of running AI after, of course, the price you pay NVIDIA for the chips. And these lower energy costs get passed on to customers.

**David Rosenthal** (3:07)
It's super cool that they can put their data centers out there in these remote locations where quote-unquote energy happens, as opposed to the other hyperscalers, such as AWS and Google and Azure, who need to build their data centers close to major traffic hubs where the Internet happens because they are doing everything in their clouds.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:23)
Yep. If you, your company, or your portfolio companies would like to use the lower cost and more performant infrastructure for your AI workloads, go to crusoecloud.com/acquired, that's C-R-U-S-O-E cloud.com/acquired, or click the link in the show notes. All right, David, I heard a rumor that you have one more thing for listeners.

**David Rosenthal** (3:44)
Indeed, one more thing. We passed a million downloads in the lifetime of Acquired.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:50)
Woo!

**David Rosenthal** (3:51)
Huge milestone. And to celebrate, we are going to do, you heard it here first, a worldwide virtual Acquired meetup. So we're going to host this in Zoom. Ben and I are going to be on video and we'll have everybody else in the Slack community. We've got a bot installed that's going to do aggregate AMA questions and we're all going to hang out. So we're going to do it on February 21st, 2019 at 5:30 PM Pacific time. We thought that would give everybody, you know, at least in the US, be 8.3 East Coast, 5.3 Pacific. And it's 9:30 AM in China for our listeners in China. So be there, be on Slack and on Zoom and we will all hang out then.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:36)
David, it's time.

**David Rosenthal** (4:38)
It's time, indeed. Well, today, we're gonna be talking about ARM holdings and we're gonna go literally from Issac Newton to the Apple Newton to MASA and SoftBank and beyond.