We heard rumblings about Intel considering a stake in Arm earlier this summer—Reuters picked up on the multinational corporation's leadership negotiating with Japan's SoftBank about becoming a potential anchor investor in the latter's initial public offering (IPO) of Arm Holdings plc. Several big players have reportedly been courted as key strategic partners—Arm already counts some of these corporations as major clients and business partners. The looming IPO has an estimated value of around $60 billion and $70 billion. Intel has made their investment public today, as announced this morning by Stuart Pann, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Foundry Services.

Pann elaborated on his company's major strategic decision, during proceedings at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia & Technology Conference: "80% of TSMC wafers have an Arm processor in them...The fact that our organization, the IFS organization, is embracing Arm at this level, investing in Arm, doing partnerships with Arm should give you a signpost that we are absolutely serious about playing this business. Because if you are not working with Arm, you cannot be a foundries provider." Despite competing in several market segements, Intel Foundry Services (IFS) and Arm announced a multi-generation agreement, earlier this year, to enable chip designers to build low-power compute system-on-chips (SoCs) on the former's 18A process. The now tighter relationship appears to be steering Team Blue back to formerly abandoned pastures—Pann stated: "Our focus will be for now, much more on ARM and around RISC-V, because that is where the volumes is at, but expect more to come out in the coming months...For example, we announced something with Arm, we will do more with them, clearly as they expand their base. They have multiple interests in multiple areas, and they have been a superb partner."