Apple and Samsung line up to invest in Arm

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Arm, the SoftBank-owned chip design company, is already lining up major investors. Apple, Samsung, Nvidia, and Intel all plan on buying stakes in Arm when it goes public in September, according to a report from Nikkei Asia.

The British chip designer plays an integral role in the technology industry. It specializes in licensing chip designs to companies, allowing the world’s tech giants to manufacture semiconductors in their own factories and apply customizations. Some of Arm’s biggest customers are the companies that plan on investing in it: Apple, Samsung, Nvidia, and Intel have all used Arm architecture in their chips.

As reported by Nikkei Asia, Arm will sell each company stakes worth “a few percent each” to help stabilize its stock price. Arm announced its plans to go public last year after Nvidia’s $40 billion deal to acquire the company fell through due to “significant regulatory challenges.” In an interview with Decoder last September, Arm CEO Rene Haas said he made the decision to file for an IPO as the company “began to pivot toward other markets,” such as licensing chip designs for cloud computing products.

“We have diversified our business by not only developing different products but also by addressing it through different parts of business model strategy,” Haas said. “We knew our business was going to be okay. All of the financial results you are seeing now, which are terrific and the team has done a fantastic job on, really come from work that was done a few years ago.”

Earlier this year, Intel announced that it will work with Arm to manufacture chips on Intel’s 18A process. Meanwhile, Qualcomm, NXP Semiconductors, and other chipmakers are looking to challenge Arm through the development of their own company to develop the rival chip architecture RISC-V.