Great tech innovators: Warren East

Warren East was CEO of ARM
Warren East was CEO of ARM for 12 years
  • Age: 53
  • Company: ARM
  • Best known for: Hardware, software
  • Quote: "It has been a privilege to lead ARM during such a momentous and exciting time for our industry."

Warren East was the Chief Executive Officer of ARM, the UK-based semiconductor and software design juggernaut with a global presence, for almost 12 years.

When East first took the chief executive position, ARM had just one processor line for mobile phones (mostly), and he directed the firm on a vast expansion to become a leading tech sector player, with the result that in his final year, the company served some 300 semiconductor customers across almost nine billion chips. And under his decade plus of leadership, the organisation scooped royalties on over 40 billion ARM-based chips.

East is a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and was awarded a CBE in 2014 for his work in the tech industry.

East became a non-executive director of Rolls-Royce in January 2014, and recently announced he's to become CEO of the company in July of this year. Currently, he's still a non-executive director of BT, Dyson and Micron Inc. among other companies, though he'll be leaving all but one of those positions when he becomes chief exec of Rolls-Royce (as that's company policy).

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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).