Nvidia has confirmed that it plans to invest in Arm’s initial public offering after the GPU giant was named as a potential “cornerstone investor” by the British chip designer.
“Arm architecture is important to Nvidia’s products and our ecosystem. We are supporting Arm by investing in its IPO,” an Nvidia spokesperson said in a late Wednesday statement to CRN.
[Related: Arm IPO’s 10 Confirmed And Potential Investors: Why Apple, Intel And Nvidia Are Among Them]
In an updated IPO filing on Tuesday, the chip designer named Nvidia among nine other cornerstone investors that have “indicated an interest in purchasing up to an aggregate of $735 million” of Arm’s shares in the upcoming offering, which could reportedly happen next week. However, Arm cautioned that “these indications of interest are not binding agreements or commitments.”
Only one other investor, Intel, has publicly confirmed so far that it will participate in Arm’s IPO.ADVERTISEMENT
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“This morning, we announced that we are an investor in Arm,” said Stuart Pann, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s contract chip manufacturing business, at a Tuesday event.
Arm’s Potential Investors A Who’s Who In The Tech World
The other cornerstone investors named by Arm are AMD, Apple, Google, Samsung Electronics, TSMC, Cadence Design Systems, MediaTek and Synopsys. While AMD declined to comment, the other companies did not respond to requests for comment.
Bob O’Donnell, president and chief analyst at TECHnalysis Research, said the investment interest by several major tech and semiconductor companies reflects the “absolutely critical importance of Arm and its continued strong existence and development.”
“Arm has played this absolutely foundational role in the tech business but in a pretty much invisible way to most of the outside world for a very long time,” O’Donnell told CRN recently.
For the IPO, Arm said it will seek a valuation of up to $52 billion when it lists under the “ARM” ticket on Nasdaq. The company plans to offer 95.5 million American depository shares in the range of $47 to $51 apiece. Its current owner, Japanese investment giant SoftBank Group, plans to own roughly 90 percent of Arm’s shares following the IPO, according to the filing.
Nvidia’s IPO Investment Plan Comes After Failed Arm Deal
Nvidia previously tried to acquire Arm for $40 billion in a deal announced back in 2020, but the company’s plan fell through in early 2022 after facing significant regulatory opposition over concerns that it would unfairly use its ownership of Arm’s technology to harm competitors.
“The reason why people were concerned with Nvidia’s potential purchase is they didn’t want that control to go to one place. [Arm] really is sort of the Switzerland of tech, and everybody wanted it to continue to be the Switzerland of tech, because they wanted it to be a neutral place where everybody could go,” said O’Donnell.
Despite the significant setback, Nvidia has remained resolute in supporting the Arm architecture and building products around it. Even before the acquisition attempt, Nvidia had spent several years building system-on-chips with Arm processor cores for embedded devices, and it has since expanded those efforts to supporting and building Arm-based CPUs for high-performance computing systems.
Nvidia’s highest-profile Arm product to date is Grace, a 72-core CPU that will go inside the upcoming Grace and Grace Hopper Superchips. The former product brings together two Grace CPUs while the latter combines a Grace CPU with an Hopper H100 data center GPU.LEARN MORE: CPUs-GPUs
Dylan Martin is a senior editor at CRN covering the semiconductor, PC, mobile device, and IoT beats. He has distinguished his coverage of the semiconductor industry thanks to insightful interviews with CEOs and top executives; scoops and exclusives about product, strategy and personnel changes; and analyses that dig into the why behind the news. He can be reached at [email protected].
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