Softbank Seemingly Lines Up Apple, AMD, and Nvidia for Arm IPO: Report

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Arm lines up strategic investors ahead of IPO.

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According to a Bloomberg report, quoting "people familiar with the situation" Arm's upcoming IPO has garnered impressive backing from industry stalwarts, such as Apple, Nvidia, Intel, and Samsung as Softbank Group is preparing for a public offering. The anticipated IPO, valued between $60 billion and $70 billion, promises significant shifts in the tech industry landscape as it will show whether investors are ready to invest in new chip stocks. As the news comes from an unofficial source, take it with a pinch of salt.

SoftBank has seemingly secured endorsements from major technology firms that happen to be major Arm licensees, like Apple, AMD, Cadence, Intel, Google, Nvidia, Samsung, and Synopsys for Arm's public offering. These industry giants could infuse between $25 million and $100 million each, indicating strong faith in the chip company's potential.

Originally, SoftBank intended to garner between $8 billion to $10 billion through the IPO. However, after a strategic decision to retain a more significant share of Arm, this target was recalibrated to a fundraising goal of $5 billion to $7 billion. SoftBank's acquisition of the Vision Fund's stake in Arm solidified the company's valuation at a commendable $64 billion.

The success of Arm's public market debut is of paramount importance to SoftBank and its CEO, Masayoshi Son. After the Vision Fund's hefty loss of $30 billion in the previous fiscal year, a flourishing IPO could be a much-needed win for the conglomerate. Moreover, a successful listing for Arm might act as a catalyst, propelling other firms, including Instacart, Klaviyo, and Birkenstock, to consider their public offerings.

Masayoshi Son is reportedly keen on maintaining significant control over Arm, not wishing to release more than 10% of the company during this initial phase. This aligns with SoftBank's recent decision to buy the Vision Fund's stake in Arm, a move underscoring the conglomerate's belief in Arm's long-term viability.

In preparation for the impending IPO, Arm has enlisted the services of global financial behemoths. Leading the charge on this offering are Barclays, Goldman Sachs Group, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and Mizuho Financial Group, a testament to Arm's global appeal and the potential windfall banks anticipate from the deal.

Anton Shilov
Anton Shilov
Contributing Writer

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

9 Comments Comment from the forums
  • bit_user
    Originally, SoftBank intended to garner between $8 billion to $10 billion through the IPO. However, after a strategic decision to retain a more significant share of Arm, this target was recalibrated to a fundraising goal of $5 billion to $7 billion.
    I think they're either letting their greed get the better of them, or they're posturing. If the latter, then I'm not sure if the intended audience is more internal (i.e. Softbank's shareholders) vs. external (i.e. ARM's potential investors).

    Either way, I hope the IPO is successful enough to keep ARM viable. We need them for a while yet, until the RISC-V ecosystem is mature enough to take over.
    ; )
    Reply
  • ekio
    Spending a billion to control barely a percent of an over evaluated company... sounds like a waste.
    ARM doesn't make that much money for licenses, it would take decades to make up the investment, if things were never changing ever but...

    Since RISC-V is technically cleaner, better, free, loved by a very active open source community, and potentially able to achieve chips that are 2x denser than an ARM equivalent, and that in a few years China'a investment will lead to a super mature hardware ecosystem, ARM is not gonna thrive for that long. I think that Softbank know that very well.
    Reply
  • TerryLaze
    ekio said:
    Spending a billion to control barely a percent of an over evaluated company... sounds like a waste.
    ARM doesn't make that much money for licenses, it would take decades to make up the investment, if things were never changing ever but...

    Since RISC-V is technically cleaner, better, free, loved by a very active open source community, and potentially able to achieve chips that are 2x denser than an ARM equivalent, and that in a few years China'a investment will lead to a super mature hardware ecosystem, ARM is not gonna thrive for that long. I think that Softbank know that very well.
    The companies wouldn't spend that money for the control over the company but rather to ensure that ARM keeps existing so that apple nvidia and all the smartphone companies can keep making their products to keep making money.
    If ARM falls apart a lot of companies are going to close shop and those companies are willing to pay up to keep ARM around.

    Risc-v will destroy arm the same way that arm destroyed x86, so mainly not at all.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    ekio said:
    Spending a billion to control barely a percent of an over evaluated company... sounds like a waste.
    ARM doesn't make that much money for licenses, it would take decades to make up the investment, if things were never changing ever but...
    You act like this money is flushed down the toilet. The thing about an investment is that you can sell it. Maybe you get a bit more back, maybe a bit less. But, unless something catastrophic happens or you really take your eye off the ball, it almost never goes to 0, before you can get out.

    In the meantime, most of these companies are ARM's customers, who have a vested interest in ARM getting enough funding to continue designing competitive IP. If you look at it from that perspective, then it's easy to see why they helping prop up ARM's price. It's actually a pretty cheap investment, compared to what they'd have to spend to reach the same level of refinement, sophistication, and performance.

    ekio said:
    Since RISC-V is technically cleaner, better,
    I'm not sure about "better". Also, "clean" is overrated, as we've seen from the x86 example.

    ekio said:
    potentially able to achieve chips that are 2x denser than an ARM equivalent,
    Source?

    ekio said:
    and that in a few years China'a investment will lead to a super mature hardware ecosystem,
    China sure has increased the level of competitiveness, but a lot of companies at the forefront of RISC-V aren't Chinese.

    ekio said:
    ARM is not gonna thrive for that long. I think that Softbank know that very well.
    The funny thing is that you'd expect them to sell more shares, if they believed ARM's days were numbered. That, and not buy out the Vision Fund's shares.

    TerryLaze said:
    Risc-v will destroy arm the same way that arm destroyed x86, so mainly not at all.
    Those are big words. I'll agree that it won't happen overnight, but a lot can change in a decade.
    Reply
  • TerryLaze
    bit_user said:
    Those are big words. I'll agree that it won't happen overnight, but a lot can change in a decade.
    Risc came out a decade after cisc, 1980 compared to 1970, it's now 43 years or almost 4 and a half decades later....it didn't happen yet and it will never happen.
    There will always be enough use cases where either one will be far superior so neither one will ever completely destroy the other one.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    TerryLaze said:
    Risc came out a decade after cisc, 1980 compared to 1970, it's now 43 years or almost 4 and a half decades later....it didn't happen yet and it will never happen.
    You're entitled to your opinion about the future, as none of us can truly know what will happen. However, not your own version of history.

    It's incorrect to say RISC "didn't happen". Actually, RISC CPUs powered the Internet revolution. Until the early 2000's, most internet servers were powered by SPARC, MIPS, PA-RISC, Alpha, or POWER - all RISC CPUs.

    What propelled x86 past the RISC posse was its volume, more than anything else, which funded more R&D and enabled lower pricing. Intel's Itanium deal with HP put the first nail in the coffin of PA-RISC, which was one of the stronger players in the field. SGI made a string of famously bad business decisions and never really chased the internet server market, which took MIPS out of the running. Compaq bought DEC and sold off the CPU division to Intel, who subsequently killed off Alpha, consistently one of the fastest CPUs (if not the fastest) in its day.

    That left Sun holding the bag, but Sun wasn't structured to compete with commodity computers, like x86, and was undercut on price. They even entered the x86 server market, but too late. Most people who wanted an x86 UNIX server were already buying them from x86 PC makers and running Linux on them. Then Oracle came in and bought Sun for its Java technology. Oracle milked the SPARC server market, but starved the CPUs of R&D funding, until they were finally killed a few years ago.

    The one thing it had nothing to do with was CISC vs. RISC. Internally, Intel CPUs, since the Pentium Pro have been a lot more RISC-like than CISC. And if CISC were so great, you ought to be able to point to other examples which remained competitive during the late 90's and beyond. But, you can't.
    Reply
  • TerryLaze
    bit_user said:
    It's incorrect to say RISC "didn't happen". Actually, RISC CPUs powered the Internet revolution. Until the early 2000's, most internet servers were powered by SPARC, MIPS, PA-RISC, Alpha, or POWER - all RISC CPUs.
    And where did I say that arm didn't happen?
    You are making stuff up in your brain again.
    We were talking about arm destroying x86 and if that did happened for you then your mind is farther gone than I thought.

    bit_user said:
    The one thing it had nothing to do with was CISC vs. RISC. Internally, Intel CPUs, since the Pentium Pro have been a lot more RISC-like than CISC. And if CISC were so great, you ought to be able to point to other examples which remained competitive during the late 90's and beyond. But, you can't.
    I don't need to point to other examples of cisc because the one example of cisc is completely predominate.

    Whatever overtaking arm is going to do already happened and risc-v is only going to be an alternative for arm.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    TerryLaze said:
    And where did I say that arm didn't happen?
    You are making stuff up in your brain again.
    We were talking about arm destroying x86
    If we're talking about datacenters and web hosting, then RISC indeed took that ground from minicomputers (some of which were the most CISC machines ever created) and held it until the early 2000's.

    TerryLaze said:
    I don't need to point to other examples of cisc because the one example of cisc is completely predominate.
    With only one example, you can't say whether it's because x86 is CISC or in spite of CISC that it has succeeded.

    Again, there have been a lot of CPU ISAs, since the 1980's. If CISC was so great, you'd really expect to see more examples of it popping up and/or sticking around, yet we haven't.
    Reply
  • Rogue Leader
    TerryLaze said:
    And where did I say that arm didn't happen?
    You are making stuff up in your brain again.
    We were talking about arm destroying x86 and if that did happened for you then your mind is farther gone than I thought.

    This is not an official warning, just an advisory.... You are getting REALLY close to personally attacking him. We (the moderators) see this. I am suggesting you quit while you're ahead and stop anything in the future that seems like this.
    Reply