A smartphone with the Arm Ltd. logo is placed on it. on a computer motherboard in this illustration taken on March 6, 2023.
Dice Ruvik | Reuters
Chip design firm Arm said in a filing on Tuesday that Apple, Google parent Alphabet, Nvidia and other technology companies are interested in buying up to $735 million of its shares as it seeks to go public on the Nasdaq stock exchange.
The investments may not be made, but the fact that these companies are considering them underscores the importance of Arm, whose processor designs are used in data center servers, consumer devices and industrial products.
Chip foundry operators Intel, Samsung and TSMC are interested in investing along with the three trillion dollar technology companies, along with AMD and MediaTek, that make chip designs based on Arm architectures. Cadence Design Systems and Synopsys, which make electronic design automation software for processor development, have also expressed interest, according to a revised Arm sale prospectus. As part of the deal, Arm could receive a market value of $52 billion and nearly $5 billion in new cash.
Initial public offerings in technology have been rare in the past two years as higher interest rates have made investors less willing to bet on risky high-growth companies. Arm, established in 1990, is different. It was listed in London and New York before SoftBank bought it for $32 billion in 2016. It made $105 million in profit on $675 million in revenue in the second quarter.
In 2020, Nvidia announced plans to acquire Arm from SoftBank for $40 billion, but regulators in the US and UK rejected it. The two companies dropped the deal in 2022, paving the way for Arm’s current initial public offering in the US. Nvidia has introduced its own Arm chip that can work in conjunction with its own GPUs.
The fact that Nvidia wasn’t able to buy Arm didn’t stop Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang from talking about Arm during the chip design company’s IPO roadshow.
“Arm is an extraordinary company, and everyone in the world knows how much I admire this company, this platform, this franchise, and the world-class management team,” Huang said, donning his signature leather jacket during the pre-recorded promotional video.
Huang said Nvidia is collaborating with Arm on a new cloud data center ecosystem. Historically, Intel chips have dominated data center servers.
Huang isn’t Arm’s only outside promoter. Rick Tsai, Vice Chairman and CEO of MediaTek, appeared during Arm’s virtual roadshow, saying that more products based on those of the two companies will appear over time.
He watches: Portfolio manager discusses investment risks related to Arm’s IPO
(tags for translation)United States