Arm Files for Initial Public Offering, as the Company Faces Increasing Pressure From RISC-V

Chip IP specialist Arm has announced the filing of a registration statement for an initial public offering (IPO), seven years after the company was taken private by Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group — with the public listing to take place on the NASDAQ exchange.

"Arm Holdings Limited ('Arm') today announced that it has publicly filed a registration statement on Form F-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) relating to the proposed initial public offering of American depository shares (ADS) representing its ordinary shares," the company's statement explains. "Arm has applied to list the ADSs on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol 'ARM.' The number of ADSs to be offered and the price range for the proposed offering have yet to be determined."

Arm, then spelled ARM, has its origins in UK home and educational computing specialist Acorn Computers. Originally an acronym for "Acorn RISC Machine," then later "Advanced RISC Machine," Arm was set up in 1990 as a joint venture between Acorn, Apple, and VLSI Technology, Arm's claim to fame was an in-house reduced instruction set computing (RISC) chip design first released as an add-on for the BBC Micro family of computers then powering Acorn's Archimedes family.

While Acorn would fall by the wayside as IBM compatibles swallowed the previously-fragmented computing market, Arm would not: the company has continued producing processor IP, along with related technologies including secure elements, graphics processors, and most recently machine learning accelerators, and powers the overwhelming majority of mobile devices on the market today. The company has also been making inroads into high-performance computing in the data center, powering Japan's Fugaku supercomputer, and on the desktop, with co-founder Apple recently adopting Arm IP for its iPad, iPhone, Mac, and MacBook devices after historical jumps from the MOS 6502 to the Motorola 68000, IBM PowerPC, and Intel x86 architectures.

The company had been publicly traded following flotations on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and NASDAQ in 1998, but in 2016 Japan's SoftBank Group acquired the company outright at a $32 billion valuation. By 2020, SoftBank — facing stiff losses from its Vision Fund venture capital arm — sought to move the company on, and agreed a deal with NVIDIA which fell through following regulatory concerns. Now, SoftBank is taking the company public once again — though it is expected to retain 90 percent ownership following the listing.

SoftBank has not publicly stated its expected valuation for the company, though this month took back the 25 percent of the company it had previously transferred to the Vision Fund at a $64 billion valuation. If so, it would represent a major gain in value for the company — at a time when it's facing increasingly stiff competition from chips designed around the free and open source RISC-V instruction set architecture.

No date has been given for the listing.