Arm IPO’s 10 Confirmed And Potential Investors: Why Apple, Intel And Nvidia Are Among Them

September 07, 2023, 01:00 PM EDT

The British chip designer reveals that AMD, Apple and Google are among the potential ‘cornerstone investors’ in its much-hyped initial public offering. Two others, Intel and Nvidia, confirmed their plans to invest. ‘Arm has played this absolutely foundational role in the tech business but in a pretty much invisible way to most of the outside world for a very long time,’ an analyst says.

AMD

An AMD spokesperson declined to confirm the chip designer’s plan to invest in Arm’s IPO and referred to what Arm’s updated IPO filing said about potential investors.

While Santa Clara, Calif.-based AMD relies on the x86 instruction set architecture for the processing cores inside its client and server CPUs, it uses Arm’s architectures within other chip products. These include AMD’s Pensando data processing units, Alveo accelerator cards, Versal adaptive system-on-chips, among others.

AMD also uses Arm as the basis for the secure co-processor, known officially as the Platform Security Processor, that is embedded within its EPYC server CPUs to enable security features.

While the chip designer relies on Arm for several products, it’s looking to stave off competition from companies such as Amazon Web Services and Ampere Computing that are developing Arm-based CPUs with high core counts and high energy efficiency for cloud computing.

AMD plans to compete with Arm-based cloud CPUs with the recently launched EPYC 97X4 CPUs, which cap at 128 cores and come with energy efficiency advantages over its vanilla server chips.

Learn More: CPUs-GPUs

Dylan Martin

Dylan Martin is a senior editor at CRN covering the semiconductor, PC, mobile device, and IoT beats. He has distinguished his coverage of the semiconductor industry thanks to insightful interviews with CEOs and top executives; scoops and exclusives about product, strategy and personnel changes; and analyses that dig into the why behind the news. He can be reached at dmartin@thechannelcompany.com.