Biggest IPO of 2023, Arm on Nasdaq

Arm Holdings has commenced its second term on the NASDAQ stock exchange with a substantial valuation of $54.5 billion . This marks a significant milestone for the British tech giant.

The run-up to the IPO was the talk of not just the tech industry but also the global financial community—as this year’s largest IPO so far: SoftBank sold 95.5 million American Depositary shares of Arm at 51 apiece, raising 4.87 billion in the listing.

The listing is considered a barometer of financial markets’ current appetite for tech stocks. But it is also part of the ongoing story of what SoftBank will do next with the company it purchased in 2016 for 32 billion. The IPO has been viewed as a positive development for the tech industry, as it could potentially open up the market for other technology IPOs that have been on hold for nearly two years. ARM’s listing is considered a test of confidence in the AI boom. Nvidia tried to buy Arm for 40 billion but that fell through. Now, Nvidia is among the reported cornerstone investors, along with other customers like Apple, Alphabet, AMD, Intel, Samsung and TSMC.

Arm’s business model and strategy for growth beyond smartphones include AI and data centers. In fact, Arm CPUs already run AI and ML workloads in billions of devices, and they are seeing it explode across customer applications and endpoints. In areas of intense computing power like large language models and generative AI, there will be a heightened emphasis on the low power acceleration of these algorithms, which is Arm’s focus. In fact, in their latest ISA, CPUs, and GPUs, they have added new functionality and instructions to further accelerate future AI and ML algorithms—that’s their growth story.

Arm’s growth story also includes partnerships with automotive companies as carmakers increase computing power requirements within their vehicles. Arm said it will strive to be a natural partner for car companies from engine management to assisted-driving technology.

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