The author is a Dutch journalist with no technology background. I wouldn't jump to get my information from this source. As a person who works in the UK semiconductor industry, I noticed 4 or 5 glaring holes in the article in just the first couple of paragraphs.
I got to the second sentence ("Europe is pouring more than €2 billion into sovereign cloud initiatives") before I realize the author either doesn't know and/or didn't care to research properly.
ARM has the exact same problem via TrustZone. Different technical implementation, slightly different known capabilities, but fundamentally, still an unauditable, unremovable ring -3 subsystem that cannot be controlled by the legitimate, lawful owner of the hardware.
I'd also argue that while Softbank has capital ownership of the company, the leadership structure and how that capital is allocated is still done within the UK with standard board oversight. I know a few of the leadership team personally, and they have a wide remit, almost more so than a public company might do.
Actually there are more if you count the ones which are not at the cutting edge but your point still stands, most high-end silicon companies only do design.
As far as cloud service servers are concerned, I don't think ARM CPUs have any meaningful marketshare, right?
You could start running things on ARM, but, almost certainly, that comes with a lot of extra friction. (Not saying that isn't a bad idea, it'd probably improve the ecosystem as a whole and flush out architecture-specific assumptions in server software. But it's not someting trivial to do.)
AWS runs a lot of ARM server and they are pushed heavily since they are cheaper and faster. And with Apple running ARM it is just easier to fully transition now.
If the processor is mostly idle or running minimally optimized software, which is most software, then ARM offers better performance per watt. If the processor is running highly optimized code at max throughput all the time then x86 offers better performance per watt.
This is an intrinsic tradeoff. To make low-utilization workloads more power efficient you have to make high-utilization workloads less power efficient and vice versa. ARM and x86 differentiate themselves by taking opposite ends of that tradeoff spectrum.
More than 50 % of new CPU capacity on AWS is arm. Most of their own stuff uses it, nitro co processors are also arm. Anyone caring about cost of AWS has or is transitioning.
Arm has been growing fast for years, recent stories claim ARM is at 50% for hyperscalers (google, amazon and microsoft are making their own designs) and 25% for general servers according to stories from this year, and the share is growing fast.
x86/64 is looking more and more like the next Alpha or MIPS in many ways.