According to Japan’s Nikkei newspaper reported on Tuesday, Apple and Samsung Electronics are reportedly planning to invest in Arm, the SoftBank-owned chip design company.
The British chip designer which specialises in licensing chip designs to companies plays a huge role in the technology industry, allowing the world’s tech giants to manufacture semiconductors in their own factories and apply customizations.
Last month it was reported that ARM was in talks to bring in US chip designer Nvidia as an investor for the New York listing. In June Reuters reported that the British chip designer was in talks with 10 companies, including Intel, Apple and Samsung.
Apple, Samsung, Nvidia, and Intel have all used Arm designs in their chips.
According to Nikkei newspaper report, ARM will sell each company stakes worth “a few percent each.” The investment will help stabilise its stock price.
ARM CEO Rene Haas said he made a decision to file for IPO as the company “began to pivot toward other markets,” such as licensing chip designs for cloud computing products.
“We have diversified our business by not only developing different products but also by addressing it through different parts of business model strategy,” Haas said. “We knew our business was going to be okay. All of the financial results you are seeing now, which are terrific and the team has done a fantastic job on, really come from work that was done a few years ago.”
