Nikkei is reporting that chip design company Arm is set to go public on the US Nasdaq stock exchange later this year, with an IPO valued at more than $60 billion.
Apple, Samsung, Nvidia, Intel, and other leading chipmakers will invest in Arm stock when it goes public. For Apple, this ownership stake will help secure a stable future for the chip architecture that forms the foundations of all of its Apple Silicon chips.
Nikkei says the chipmakers will buy a few percent stake each when the company stock is floated, seen as long-term shareholders that will stabilize the Arm stock price and give the companies some sway over Arm’s management.
Nvidia previously tried to buy Arm outright for $44 billion. Antitrust regulators ultimately blocked the deal from going ahead in February 2022. When Arm goes public in September, the company’s value is expected to be worth in excess of $60 billion.
ARM chip architecture has propelled Apple to be the mobile devices giant, with Arm beating out Intel’s x86 architecture on mobile performance and power efficiency. All Apple Silicon chips are based on the ARM architecture.
In the earlier years of the iPhone and iPad, chips like the A4 and A5 were essentially rebranded versions of Arm reference designs. As Apple has built out its own silicon engineering groups, the Apple chips diverged from Arm reference designs more and more, culminating in the M1 design in 2020 that allowed Apple to fully divorce itself from Intel across its entire range of products. Nevertheless, the base CPU instruction architecture remains the same.
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