What could the parent company even do if something like this occurred across less-then-friendly national boundaries? Could the parent company sue to force the errant division to close? In what court?

It's bizarre that it's not more common...

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-07-01/main-s... look for "Who controls a company?"

Most commonly know example is "bearer bonds", which are often used in heist movies and similar films, including, in the original script, in Ferris Bueller's Day Off[1].

[1] https://goat.com.au/ferris-buellers-day-off/today-i-learned-...

I don't understand how the guy controls anything. Even if say he has all the designs copied in China, Arm Global could just declare those are stolen designs and anyone that uses it without paying the global company directly would be in violation of that and could be sued (in other countries, if not China).

I think the only reason this comical and absurd situation continues is only because - like many tech companies before it - Arm continues to hope for bread crumbs in the "huge Chinese market" and accept being at the mercy of the CCP, even though this has proven to be a disastrous strategy for most other companies that thought like this. In the end, the government just gives your tech to the local companies, that end up dominating there, and maybe even globally later on, with your tech.

They did. And in other for a new Seal to be approved, it required something else ( I cant remember what it was ) which was also in the hand of the CEO. So in China under their law ARM China is perfectly fine and there is nothing they can / would do. ( Not that they are trying to help ) ARM UK and US can't do much apart from not supplying future design to ARM China.

I should note all of these was before UK and China's tension got worse.

https://www.handelsblatt.com/english/companies/carl-zeiss-an...

1. https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Softbanks-Arm-Chi...

Typical in very corrupt countries. I grew up in one. People who lead big/important corporations are always part of the ruling party. And they do everything they can to stay in power.

And another data point, I was working for a startup one of who's investors was Sequoia, in a meeting a person from Sequoia advised us on some cloud company we can use, mentioned they are also investors in it. We asked about their China division, and he told us the China division while technically part of the same company, is in practice a complete separate thing and we shouldn't trust it at all.

I don't know how easy that is, which probably explains why it's not more common.

I don't know about Huawei, I imagine that all Chinese processor companies have backup plans for when they are prevented from using Arm -- the writing has been on the wall for a while ... Moving the RISC-V foundation to Switzerland and setting up Arm China as a separate entity were all part of the preparation.

[1] https://conferences.computer.org/isca/pdfs/ISCA2020-4QlDegUf...

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/huawei-risc-v-ai-processor...

And then what? Sure they can sell last-generation chips within China - but they won't have access to any R&D and anything they try to export will be confiscated.

I personally expect some announcement to be made late this year or early 2021. Huawei in general waits very long before it announces products or services, perk of not being a publicly traded company. Just as an interesting example, they seem to be developing a programming language and want to release it early next year, but no public announcement of any kind has been made yet. [4]

[1] https://riscv.org/membership/members/

[2] http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201908/23/WS5d5fe368a310cf3e3...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiSilicon#Smartphone_applicati...

[4] https://cntechpost.com/2020/09/13/huawei-rumored-to-be-devel...

You can't sanction public knowledge. The mere idea of such should be ridiculed.

Is it possible the USA government can say that this is open source and free for all to use, except for people in China.

For example, if Red Hat Fedora is open sourced, but Red Hat is a USA company. Then they will still be under USA jurisdiction.

Given all the lies and bullshit coming out of the current administration, I can actually see them doing this.

On a related note, I don't think it's an accident that Apple almost completely avoids talking about "Arm" but instead calls it "Apple Silicon".