Arm returns to public markets in the year's biggest IPO
The SoftBank-owned chip designer raises nearly $5B on Nasdaq, a rare bright spot that reopens a frozen IPO window.
Arm Holdings, the British chip-architecture company behind the designs in nearly every smartphone, returned to the public markets on the Nasdaq. SoftBank sold about 10% of the company, raising nearly $5 billion at a valuation around $54 billion in the largest IPO of 2023.
The debut carried outsized symbolic weight. After 18 months of a shuttered IPO window, a successful listing of this size signaled that public appetite for high-quality technology names — especially anything adjacent to AI compute — was returning.
SoftBank retained roughly 90% of the company, betting that Arm's licensing model would ride the AI wave as data-center and edge-device demand expanded. The listing also handed the Japanese conglomerate a badly needed win after the FTX-era writedowns across its Vision Fund portfolio.
