Apple, NVIDIA and others interested in sweeping up Arm stock

Apple, Google parent Alphabet, NVIDIA and other tech firms are interested in buying up to $735 million worth of stock as it seeks to go public on the Nasdaq, chip design firm Arm said in a filing Tuesday.

While these investments may not materialize, the fact that these companies are considering investing underscores the importance of Arm, whose designs are used in processors for data center servers, consumer devices and industrial products.

Chipmakers Intel, Samsung and TSMC are interested in investing alongside the three trillion-dollar tech companies mentioned above, as are AMD and MediaTek, which all make chips based on the Arm architecture. Clontech, which makes electronic design automation software for processor development, and Synopsys have also expressed similar interest. As part of the deal, Arm could have a market capitalization of $52 billion, adding nearly $5 billion in cash.

In 2020, NVIDIA had planned to buy Arm from SoftBank for $40 billion, but regulators in the U.S. and U.K. objected. The companies abandoned the deal in 2022, paving the way for Arm's IPO in the US. NVIDIA has introduced its own Arm-based chips that can work alongside its graphics processing units.

The fact that NVIDIA failed to buy Arm didn't stop its co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang from heavily promoting the company during Arm's IPO roadshow. He claimed, "Arm is an extraordinary company, and the world knows how much I love this company, this platform, this franchise and the world-class management team."

Jen-Hsun Huang said NVIDIA is working with Arm on a new cloud data center ecosystem. Intel chips have long dominated data center servers. $Apple(AAPL.US)$ $NVIDIA(NVDA.US)$ $