The British microchip giant Arm has promised its chief executive a bonus of up to $800m (£594m) if he can turn it into the UK’s first trillion-dollar company.

Arm, which is listed in New York, has outlined a pay scheme for Rene Haas under which he will be given hundreds of millions of dollars in shares for hitting ambitious market value goals.

Mr Haas would be given escalating share awards for getting Arm to hit a $1tn valuation by 2029, $1.5tn the following year and $2tn by March 2031.

The deal would be one of the biggest pay packages ever handed out by a British company.

It comes amid an AI stock market boom, with two more semiconductor companies, SK Hynix and Micron, joining the trillion-dollar club last week.

Cambridge-headquartered Arm, founded in 1990, was listed in London before it was sold to Japan’s SoftBank for £24bn in 2016. At the time, critics accused Theresa May’s government of allowing foreign investors to buy Britain’s most valuable tech company.

Arm was later listed on the Nasdaq and its value has since soared to $367bn, more than HSBC, the FTSE 100’s most valuable company.

Mr Haas’s pay proposal, disclosed in company filings, would give him 425,000 shares in Arm for hitting all the market value targets. He would receive a quarter of the award for each of the first two milestones and the remainder for reaching a $2tn valuation.

Reaching the first target, a trillion-dollar valuation, would grant shares worth $100m. At a $2tn valuation, the total award would be worth around $800m.

Arm said the scheme had been developed “to be competitive with US standards reflecting the location of our key competitors for executive and other talent, the listing … on Nasdaq and the US-location of our CEO”.

Mr Haas, who lives in California, was recently given an additional role as chief executive of SoftBank’s international business. The Japanese company owns 86pc of Arm.

Arm has been best known for providing the underlying architecture for microchips in smartphones but is increasingly pushing into chips for AI data centres.

It recently unveiled plans to start making and selling its own chips, ending more than three decades in which it merely licensed its own designs. Mr Haas has predicted that the chip could increase Arm’s revenues fivefold.

Substantial awards for hitting ambitious market capitalisation milestones have become increasingly common in the US. Elon Musk will become the world’s first trillionaire if he turns Tesla into the world’s most valuable company.

Fourteen companies have achieved trillion-dollar valuations to date, five of them being semiconductor companies.

Arm’s remuneration committee believes the pay award “appropriately reflects the significant value creation required by market capitalisation milestones,” its annual report said. It will have to be approved by shareholders at the company’s annual meeting.

Arm was contacted for comment.

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