Arm Holdings on Thursday made its trading debut on Wall Street, after pricing its initial public offering (IPO) at $51 per share for a valuation of $54 billion in high demand.
Shares of the chip designer, owned by Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, opened up 10%.
Arm, headquartered in Cambridge, England, designs semiconductors and software that powers them. The company specializes in designing central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs) and microprocessors. Processors designed by Arm are licensed and used in a wide variety of devices ranging from desktop computers to smartphones and supercomputers, as well as data servers and even cars.
SIYANG, CHINA - MARCH 01: Employees operate machines at a dust-free workshop of a semiconductor factory on March 1, 2023 in Siyang County, Suqian City, Jiangsu Province of China. ((Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images) / Getty Images)
Several notable companies are participating as investors in the IPO, including major Arm clients from the tech industry like Apple, Nvidia, Google parent Alphabet, Advanced Micro Devices and Intel.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, said Tuesday that it will invest up to $100 million in Arm’s IPO.
TSMC Chairman Mark Liu said last week that "Arm is an important element of our ecosystem, our technology and our customers’ ecosystem. We want it to be successful, we want it to be healthy. That’s the bottom line."
SoftBank will own 90.6% of Arm's ordinary shares after the offering closes, the company said, while not receiving any proceeds from the IPO, according to a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
FOX Business' Eric Revell contributed to this report.