This valuation is significantly more than the $40 billion offered by Nvidia to acquire Arm last year, a deal which SoftBank abandoned amid opposition from antitrust regulators.
Owned by the Japanese investor SoftBank since 2016, the Arm IPO was the largest this year on the US exchange and the biggest since the electric carmaker Rivian Automative’s market debut back in 2021.
According to Reuters, Arm was targeting a valuation between $50bn and $55bn. Early trading has seen Arm reach the $64bn valuation given it by Softbank last month.
Among the company’s 500 clients are Samsung, Google and Apple who use its chip designs across products ranging from iPads and mobile phones to cars and smart TVs.
Arm’s valuation was seen as high for a chip company when compared with other firms in its market, although the exception is semiconductor-maker Nvidia, which is now worth more than $1trn. The valuation is being attributed to the benefits the sector is expected to enjoy from technologies including artificial intelligence (AI), which requires ever-more powerful computational chips.
While there had been concerns about the company’s exposure to numerous risks in China, the IPO has been oversubscribed multiple times, and there has been considerable interest from leading tech giants such as Nvidia, Apple and Alphabet.
* Story updated following the start of trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
