Intel Becomes Latest Investor in Arm Holdings Alongside Apple, Alphabet, and Samsung
According to Tom’s Hardware, Intel has recently joined the list of companies investing in Arm, which already includes Samsung, Alphabet, Nvidia, and others. This decision coincides with Softbank’s preparations for Arm’s initial public offering (IPO), where they plan to offer 95.5 million shares at a price range of $47 to $51 per share. Arm is currently valued at $52 billion, surpassing the failed deal in 2022 to sell Arm to Nvidia for $40 billion, which faced obstacles such as a lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission seeking to prevent it.
By investing in what is essentially its competitor, Intel can expand beyond its x86 chips – which aren’t nearly as powerful as what Arm currently makes. Intel Foundry Services President and CEO Stuart Pann confirmed the investment during a Goldman Sachs Communacopia & Technology conference call. “80 percent of TSMC’s wafers have an ARM processor,” Pann said. “The fact that our organization, the IFS organization, is embracing ARM at this level, investing in ARM, partnering with ARM, should give you a clue that we’re absolutely serious about this business, because if you’re not working for ARM with you can’t be a foundry supplier.” As an “anchor investor,” Intel should have better access to Arm’s future chip design IP, which it can then produce through its growing contract factory plans.
As part of that expansion, Pann added, the company would focus more on other low-power chipsets, including RISC-V, which he said has “volumes” in the new world of mobile-first computing. After all, Intel’s point in opening up its factories to third parties was primarily to admit that its own efforts in this area had not been as successful as its much smaller competitor.
Intel’s decision to invest in Arm comes at a time of tremendous growth (and incentives) in the chip manufacturing industry. Earlier this year, the Biden administration released funding requests for companies to get a $39 billion slice of semiconductor manufacturing. Recently, Apple extended its licensing agreement with Arm until 2040. The iPhone maker was the founder of a company that first used its technology in its (ultimately doomed) Newton and now more recently as the backbone of its entire product line.
