Cloud News
Amazon’s Potential Arm IPO Investment: 5 Things To Know From AI To AWS
Mark Haranas
From boosting AWS cloud capabilities to making Amazon an AI powerhouse, here are five things to know about Amazon’s potential anchor investment in Arm’s upcoming IPO.
From reports that Amazon now owns more than 50 percent of all Arm server CPUs across the world to Amazon Web Services’ ambitious plans to pour billions into artificial intelligence and new data centers that need vast amounts of server CPUs, Amazon becoming a potential anchor investor in Arm’s upcoming IPO seems like a real possibility.
“I was with the CEO of OpenAI [Sam Altman] in April and he made a comment I thought was very provocative and compelling,” Justin Copie, CEO of Innovative Solutions, a Premier Tier AWS partner, told CRN. “It was around the fact that whoever owns and can get computer processing to a place that is exponentially bigger, faster, and better than it is today—they will own the AI landscape. That will be the game changer for AI.”
Amazon’s AWS cloud business has already been working and co-innovating with semiconductor superstar Arm for years around Amazon’s Arm-based chip Graviton. However, Copie said if AWS can partner tighter with Arm via a potential investment in its IPO, the move could be an AI blockbuster.
“If you think about AWS and the very strategic direction they’re thinking about Arm and computer processing overall, I believe that it is predicated and probably being pushed largely based on the fact that if they can help accelerate this and they own that computing power at their disposal before anybody else—they have this competitive advantage to accelerate with AI better than anybody else,” said Copie. “So it’s very logical and understandable.”
[Related: Cloud Market Share Q2 2023: AWS, Microsoft, Google Battle]
Arm’s IPO is expected to be one of biggest in 2023, with the potential to raise up to $10 billion.
As a possible cornerstone investor for Arm’s IPO, Amazon and AWS have the ability to take its go-to-market relationship and technology synergies with Arm to the next level.
Nvidia’s Failed $40 Billion Bid For Arm
Before jumping into the five biggest things to know about Amazon and Arm’s IPO future, it’s key to note how Arm’s upcoming IPO in 2023 became such a hot topic across the IT industry.
Japan-based multinational investment firm SoftBank is the owner of UK-based Arm. The Japanese investment giant has been striving to put Arm on the public market since its blockbuster sale to fellow chip maker Nvidia for $40 billion fell threw in 2022 due to objections from antitrust regulators in Europe and the United States. This included a lawsuit from the U.S Federal Trade Commission seeking to block the deal over concerns that the GPU giant would unfairly use its ownership of Arm to hurt competition.
The deal failure prompted SoftBank to pivot planning for an Arm IPO. It’s not only semiconductor companies who are looking to jointly own the British chip designer, but other technology powerhouses as well, including the likes of industry titans such as Amazon and Google.
Here are the five biggest things Arm and AWS customers, partners and investors need to know about Amazon’s potential investment in Arm’s IPO.
