SoftBank Group Corp has shelved its blockbuster sale of Arm Ltd to U.S. chipmaker Nvidia Corp valued at up to $80 billion citing regulatory hurdles and will instead seek to list the company.
Britain’s Arm, which named a new CEO on Tuesday, said it would go public before March 2023 and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son indicated that would be in the United States, most likely the Nasdaq.
As everyone already expected.
So many great news this week.
I am not sure how this will play out for SoftBank, which was expecting a huge paycheck for ARM. They lost investor money in WeWork fiasco, and still trying to recoup those loses.
But for the tech industry as a whole, an independent ARM would be very welcome. Hope the IPO goes well, though.
Investor money ? Impostor money ! Fixed.
SoftBank is a front for Saudi oil money.
They do have very large investments from Saudi prince, yes. But probably not a front. It would be shortsighted to call them so. There are many other investors, even including Qualcomm.
Nevertheless, they are still losing money. The latest round was China cracking down on their tech companies: https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/11/8/softbanks-vision-fund-sees-record-loss#:~:text=The%20little%2Dknown%20Chinese%20startup,new%20record%20in%20that%20quarter.&text=SoftBank%20held%20a%20total%20of,end%20of%20the%20previous%20quarter.
Even without any “conspiracy”, a fund losing billions after billions where the market is going up, is definitely in trouble.
Indeed. “Front” implies the Saudis are using SoftBank to wash money earmarked for terrorism, and I’m pretty sure that’s not SoftBank.
HardYaw is a back for sausage oil gravy.
This is a fun game. 🙂
Finally.
ARM should have always been independent. Their purchase by SoftBank was a sad and tumultuous time for ARM, with the future of the company in doubt.
Seeing them go independent again will be a great fresh start for the company, at a time when ARM processors are becoming more and more dominant. I’m only hoping that this newfound independence allows ARM to grow as a corporation, allowing them to challenge the greats like Intel and AMD
Currently, ARM is stuck between RISC-V at the low end/embedded (why pay ARM when you can use something free?) and Apple chips at the high end (where ARM gets almost nothing, can’t sell Apple’s design to others, and can’t create designs that compete with M1 either). They’re not going to grow. They’re going to shrink slowly over the next 10+ years (and then probably go open source in a last ditch attempt to avoid death, and then die, like MIPS did).
Brendan,
There are always solutions.
On the low end, they can offer cheaper licenses, and in fact, they already do: https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/embedded-revolution/article/21808309/arm-eases-upfront-licensing-fees-to-head-off-riscv
And Apple M1, while currently “unique”, is not necessarily “better” as an overall design. At the very high end, ARM server chips from Ampere, or Amazon AWS in house designs are still better at specialized tasks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25107711
Brendan,
I also think it will be difficult for them to “grow”, but die like MIPS seems unlikely to me. MIPS never had anything like ARM’s market share. ARM cannot grow in markets it already dominates, They’re already in so many embeded devices, mobiles, streaming devices, automative entertainment systems, which isn’t a bad position to be in but where do they go from there? The logical alternative is new markets that either don’t exist, or are dominated by ARM’s competitors.
x86 dominates the desktop. ARM has some architectural and efficiency advantages but x86 has been a tough nut to crack thanks to the importance of preexisting x86 software.
I think ARM is better positioned to tackle the data center. Linux dominates there and x86 binaries are quite irrelevant. However as someone who has taken great interest in ARM servers, they have largely failed to address how difficult it is to get mainline linux and bog-standard distros working with off the shelf ARM devices, While this has less to do with the ARM ISA and more to do with system integrator implementations, the resulting fragmentation is nevertheless the achilles heel for ARM and IMHO is singlehandedly its biggest shortcoming. Until they address this many of us continue to buy x86 because it’s so much easier to support.
I think things evolved this way because ARM’s customers are the huge manufacturers that sell millions/billions of devices. But they’ve completely neglected the end users. So, if I had a say at ARM, I would change this by pushing for better standards for end users and create a new trademark to certify ARM devices that are compatible with these standards. End user consumers could then buy these ARM devices with confidence that it will work easily in their applications. If they could make it so that ARM just works (and with standards I assert they could), it would eliminate one of x86’s biggest advantages over it.
ARM is going to be fine. Going public opens them to get revenue streams from some of their clients like Apple and Qualcomm, in terms of controlling shares, that they ain’t getting from licensing.
RISC-V will likely fill the niches were ARM/x86 aren’t going; like academic/research projects, scalar front ends for accelerators, deeply embedded/sythensizable stuff that is not visible to the programmer (DSP modem blocks, etc).
There’s plenty of market for everybody.
Being purchased by SoftBank was one of the best things that happened to ARM actually.
Shame it’s not going on the FTSE. No tax revenue from the UK company being listed for the UK 🙁
Is a UK company a UK company if it’s owned by a Japanese conglomerate or is it merely a corporate office?
Arguably no, but the HQ and therefore its tax liabilities are UK based currently, even if its owned by a foreign company.
However I Think im right in saying to list on Nasdaq, your HQ has to be US based, which would shift its taxation commitments from the UK to the US. (if I’m incorrect in this understanding please say)
There are more employees in the US offices and even the CEO is based in the US. I think they intend to list it in the NYSE. I assume they’re trying to maximize the IPO potential.