Arm’s IPO Task: Convince Investors It’s an AI Company
The share offering may be 2023’s biggest if the chipmaker can wrap itself in the market’s favorite buzzword.
STMicroelectronics integrated circuit microchips, designed using Arm technology.
Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg
Poke most parts of the chip business and it won’t take long before you run into Arm Ltd. The Cambridge, UK-based company sells blueprints needed to design microprocessors and licenses technology known as instruction sets that dictate how software programs communicate with those chips. The technology has been used in more than 250 billion semiconductors since Arm was founded in 1990; it now goes into just about every smartphone on the planet, as well as Apple Inc.’s Mac computers and servers at Amazon.com Inc.’s data centers.
Arm’s importance to the industry has also been underscored recently by revelations, reported by Bloomberg News and other outlets, that it’s been engaged in pre-IPO talks with a handful of big industry names, including Nvidia Corp. and Intel Corp., to become so-called anchor investors. The initial public offering Arm is planning for the fall could be the year’s biggest; it could also provide an interesting temperature check on the fever over artificial intelligence.