Bloomberg broke the news about Raspberry Pi leadership's lofty ambitions earlier this week—the news outlet reported on the UK-based "personal computer maker" appointing "bankers at Peel Hunt and Jefferies to prepare a London initial public offering (IPO)." In their opinion: "a listing that would be a win for the UK capital after an exodus of companies to the US." The Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer launched last autumn, and proved to be a hit with hardware enthusiasts thanks to improved silicon delivering significant CPU and GPU uplifts (over Pi 4), and an in-house controller chip granting a fancier interface feature set. The Raspberry Pi Limited company is enjoying its many success stories, including an estimated valuation of ~$560 million and strategic investments courtesy of long-term partner, ARM Ltd.

Eben Upton, CEO of Raspberry Pi (Trading) Ltd., responded to a Tom's Hardware query regarding the Bloomberg news piece. He confirmed that banking firm "Peel Hunt and Jefferies" is involved in the preparation of an upcoming IPO, but nothing has been set in concrete. They expect to proceed: "when the market is ready. Right now there is no target valuation or a firm date." Upton discussed his firm's recent motivations: "We believe that London is the natural listing location for a company like Raspberry Pi, and that it wouldn't be an impediment to attracting US (or other international) investment, provided we're prepared to do the work to educate foreign investors." The listing is not expected to affect normal day-to-day operations, although he does not rule out the potential for growth: "If we do IPO at some point, I don't anticipate any changes to what Raspberry Pi Ltd does. Regardless, we're going to keep doing good engineering, designing the sorts of products we'd like to buy ourselves, and selling them to people (and companies) like us. Of course the Foundation would be able to use any money raised to do what it does at an even larger scale, which would be a great outcome."

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) yesterday made the announcement that it has approved an investment in Arm Holdings Plc. The market leader in contract chipmaker is prepared to spend around $100 million, upon the UK-headquartered semiconductor design firm going public. Regulatory filing information has SoftBank Group aiming to raise about $4.87 billion with its initial public offering (IPO) of Arm. The listing has, so far, attracted a number of "cornerstone investors" including NVIDIA, Intel, AMD, Apple, Samsung Electronics and Alphabet.

Mark Liu, TSMC's chairman, stated last week that "Arm is an important element of our ecosystem, our technology and our customers' ecosystem. We want it to be successful, we want it to be healthy. That's the bottom line." The spending spree announcements also extended to something Team Blue related—TSMC declared that it has reached an agreement with Intel to purchase a 10% equity interest in IMS Nanofabrication Global, LLC. This deal is valued at roughly $432.8 million. Intel has already sold 20% of IMS to Bain Capital, but it still retains majority ownership—the two business deals valued IMS Nanofabrication at approximately $4.3 billion, according to an Intel statement.

British semiconductor specialist firm, Arm Ltd., has has confirmed that it will be offering its clients the option to license "SoC solutions," as opposed to the usual model of paying for intellectual properties. A new Bloomberg article reaffirms previous claims that Arm's engineering department was beavering away on reference chip designs. An IPO filing, registered with the SEC, reveals that various system-on-chip designs are in the pipeline—likely targeting fast-growing tech markets.

An Arm statement explained: "More recently, we have invested in a holistic, solution-focused approach to design, expanding beyond individual design IP elements to providing a more complete system. By delivering SoC solutions optimized for specific use cases, we can ensure that the entire system works together seamlessly to provide maximum performance and efficiency. At the same time, by designing an increasingly greater portion of the overall chip design, we are further reducing incremental development investment and risk borne by our customers while also enabling us to capture more value per device." Arm is probably keen to boost its profit margins, and become more attractive in the eyes of potential investors—lately their designs have been implemented in more expensive product segments, namely automotive, client PCs, and cloud data center solutions.

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."

Arm's impending IPO, valued between $60 billion and $70 billion, has reportedly garnered substantial backing from industry giants such as Apple, NVIDIA, Intel, and Samsung, as per sources cited in a Bloomberg report. This much-anticipated public offering serves as a litmus test for investor interest in new chip-related stocks and could reshape the tech industry landscape. While the information remains unofficial, it underscores the significant support Arm has received from major licensees, including Apple, AMD, Cadence, Intel, Google, NVIDIA, Samsung, and Synopsys, with each potentially contributing between $25 million and $100 million, a testament to their confidence in Arm's future prospects. Originally, SoftBank aimed to raise $8 billion to $10 billion through the IPO, but a strategic shift to retain a larger Arm stake revised the target to $5 billion to $7 billion.

This IPO's success holds paramount importance for SoftBank and its CEO, Masayoshi Son, particularly following the Vision Fund's substantial $30 billion loss in the previous fiscal year. Masayoshi Son is reportedly committed to maintaining significant control over Arm, planning to release no more than 10% of the company's shares during this initial phase, aligning with SoftBank's recent acquisition of the Vision Fund's Arm stake and reinforcing their belief in Arm's long-term potential. Arm has enlisted renowned global financial institutions such as Barclays, Goldman Sachs Group, JPMorgan Chase & Co., and Mizuho Financial Group to prepare for the IPO, highlighting the widespread interest in the offering and the anticipated benefits for these financial institutions.

According to the latest report from Reuters, Arm Ltd has filled the documents for its initial public offering (IPO) efforts in hopes of getting publically traded later this year. The stock exchange of choice is Nasdaq, where Softbank plans to list Arm's shares publicly. Seeking to raise anywhere between 8-10 billion US Dollars, the company's market capitalization has yet to be determined. If any factor is to go by, NVIDIA tried to acquire Arm Ltd for 40 billion US Dollars, which ultimately failed due to regulators rejecting the deal.

As a reminder, Arm is changing its licensing model to boost royalties, which we reported about here. Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Barclays, and Mizuho Financial Group guide the IPO efforts.

The Financial Times this weekend has published details about an interesting development project that is currently in-the-works at British semiconductor specialist firm Arm Ltd. The article states that several executives in the industry have divulged (anonymously) that Arm's engineering team is designing a proprietary chip - these insider sources opine that this new creation could be one of the company's most advanced undertakings. The SoftBank-owned chipmaker is having a bumper year in terms of financial success and has invested in its future - it is speculated that their own semiconductor design will be showcased as a prototype product to potential new clients - with the main goal being to drum up more business and growth. Parent group SoftBank is likely pushing for maximum profit margins as it prepares Arm for an initial public offering (IPO) this year.

Arm's modus operandi involves partnering up with other chip manufacturers in order to license out its semiconductor intellectual properties. In turn these partners are expected to deal with the overall design and manufacturing processes of chips (plus sales of). Arm has teamed up with foundries TSMC and Samsung in the past to create prototypes for software testing purposes, but not much has been heard about those proofing projects in the following years. In an unusual turn (from certain industry perspectives) from its traditional working methodologies, it seems that Arm is embracing a different approach by producing its own compelling designs, with the hope of demonstrating greater potential to customers. FT's sources have provided evidence that Arm has expanded its operations and that a newly formed "solutions engineering" team is focused on prototyping new silicon for usage in mobile hardware and related devices.

Softbank, the owner of Arm Ltd., is preparing everything it can to ensure a successful initial public offering (IPO) of Arm. However, ahead of the IPO, we have more information about Arm's plans to change its licensing and pricing structures to collect more royalties and ensure higher cash flow for future investors. Currently, Arm licenses technology in the form of intellectual property (IP), usually in different flavors of Cortex-A CPU cores that go inside processors for phones and laptops. Chipmakers that use the IP have additional expenses such as Arm ISA license fee and per-chip royalty, which is based on the chip's average selling price.

However, according to Financial Times, we have a new pricing structure that changes how Arm bills its partners and customers. From now on, Arm will grant licenses to chipmakers and ask them to only ship to device makers with an agreement with Arm. Additionally, these device makers now pay per-device royalty based on the device's average selling price (ASP). This ensures that Arm's fee applies to the higher margin product, which means that ultimately Arm will collect more cash flow from its customers and partners. Currently, the old model charges around 1-2 percents per chip in each smartphone, considering the ASP of smartphone chips to be $40 for Qualcomm, $17 for MediaTek, and $6 for Unisoc. However, taking the ASP of a mobile phone at $335, as recorded in 2022, the fee would be much higher. People familiar with the matter noted that Arm will apply this pricing structure as early as 2024. Apple and Samsung are not impacted by this change, as both companies enjoy their own agreements with Arm.

NVIDIA's long-awaited acquisition of Arm Ltd. is collapsing, confirm Financial Times and Reuters. According to the latest information, the deal is not happening, and the previously agreed terms are no longer valid. As we now know, NVIDIA will have to pay Softbank (Arm's owner) a break-up fee of $1.25 billion, which was the deal that the two settled on if the acquisition fails. NVIDIA has originally planned to purchase Arm for $40 billion. However, the regulators from UK and EU have been blocking the deal from happening on the terms that it would hurt competition and block innovation.

What is next for Arm Ltd. is to go public and list itself on one of the world's biggest stock exchanges, either domestically or overseas in the US. The IPO efforts of Arm are estimated to be worth around $80 billion, representing a double amount of what NVIDIA wanted to purchase the company for.Update 08:35 UTC: Here is the official press release from NVIDIA and Softbank below:

Back in June, SiFive, a company focusing on providing RISC-V-based IP solutions, received an offer for a takeover from Intel. With a value of over two billion dollars, the company's request was on the table to accept. However, according to the latest report from Bloomberg, SiFive declined an offer and aimed to get an initial public offering or get acquired by an even larger vendor. What made the company reject, you might question?

Well, according to sources familiar with the deal, Intel's offer of two billion USD was not enough, and it interrupted the company's ideologies of operation. SiFive management didn't like how Intel would integrate the company in its roadmaps and decided to stay independent. For now, the company is looking to start an initial public offering or get acquired an even larger company that would respect its vision and guidelines, unlike Intel's offer.

KIOXIA and Western Digital are in talks to merge, creating a behemoth in the data storage industry. This would be KIOXIA's first big corporate move after being spun off from Toshiba Corporation as its flash memory business. The combination—if it goes through—would essentially see the merger of three distinct brands—KIOXIA, Western Digital, and SanDisk; with KIOXIA and SanDisk bringing together market-leading expertise in flash memory; and Western Digital bringing in "warm" and cold storage solutions, such as hard drives. 5G is expected to create an explosion in data, and the merged trans-Pacific entity could more effectively address it. A deal worth $20 billion could be struck by mid-September, if the merger talks succeed. KIOXIA is declining to comment on the story, as it prepares its IPO that includes shares from Toshiba and Bain Capital. Shares of Western Digital, meanwhile, are trading up.

Microsoft on Tuesday achieved another milestone on its road as a publicly traded company - the $2 trillion valuation milestone, that is. Microsoft may have felt slightly stung when Apple crossed that threshold first in 2020, but slowly and surely sure does pave the way. Microsoft crossed the $2 trillion valuation mark after its share rose by 1.2%. The company is currently having some of the best quarters in its history, with the latest quarter bringing in revenue increases of around $41.7 billion, and a clean, tidy, enormous $15.5 billion in profit during the same time.

Microsoft's shares have increased some 20% YoY already, and the acceleration from its $1 trillion market cap is nothing short of grandiose. The company took 33 years from its IPO (Initial Public Offering) to reach the $1 trillion valuation in 2019 - and it took them less than two years to double that to $2 trillion. COVID, of course, has its microscopic toes in this success, but so does Microsoft's increased investment and returns in gaming, as well as the lift-off of its cloud business.

Globalfoundries has announced they are in the early stages of a massive $1.4 billion investment in their manufacturing capabilities, which aims to increase overall production of semiconductor chips. One third of this development investment will be pre-paid by Globalfoundries' customers, who by investing this way, are also pre-allocating Globalfoundries' future supply - it's a way for the company to receive funds for not-yet-produced wafers, enabling it to proceed with these expansion plans. The company usually reserves $700 million yearly for capacity expansions and technology improvements, so this $1.4 billion figure essentially doubles that.

That doubling comes at a time where existing capacity throughout the semiconductor industry is showing not to be sufficient for global demand. The plans will see Globalfoundries increase its wafer production capability by 13% this year, and 20% in 2022. The increased funding for developmental expenses will be allocated equally between the company's three manufacturing plants already installed in Dresden, Malta (New York) and Singapore. Globalfoundries' 2020 revenue ended up at $5.7 billion, a cutback from 2017's $6.176 billion. The company, however, projects its revenue to increase 9-10% in 2021 due to the current unprecedented demand for its fabrication technologies. The company is also looking to capitalize on this demand in another way: by bringing its IPO forward. Where before the company planned to go public in 2022 or even 2023, the increased current demand and prospective YoY growth places the company in a good place for such a move.

Corsair Gaming, Inc. ("Corsair"), a leading global provider and innovator of high-performance gear for gamers and content creators, announced today that it has commenced an initial public offering of 14,000,000 shares of its common stock, approximately 7,500,000 of which are being offered by Corsair and approximately 6,500,000 of which are being offered by a selling stockholder. In connection with the offering, the underwriters will also have a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 2,100,000 shares of common stock from the selling stockholder. The initial public offering price is estimated to be between $16.00 and $18.00 per share. Corsair has applied to list its common stock on the Nasdaq Global Market under the ticker symbol "CRSR." The offering is subject to market conditions, and there can be no assurance as to whether, or when, the offering may be completed or as to the actual size or terms of the offering.

Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC, Barclays and Credit Suisse are serving as lead book-running managers and as representatives of the underwriters for the proposed offering. Macquarie Capital, Baird, Cowen and Stifel are also acting as book-running managers for the proposed offering. Wedbush Securities and Academy Securities are acting as co-managers for the proposed offering.

Kioxia, previously Toshiba Memory Holdings has recently announced plans for an initial public offering on the Tokyo stock exchange in October with a projected market capitalization of 19 billion USD. Kioxia is the world's second-largest manufacturer of NAND flash memory behind Samsung Electronics, the company has experienced heavy losses in recent years recording a loss of 1.6 billion USD in the previous financial year. The company is currently owned by Toshiba with a 40% stake with the rest being held by a consortium of US, Japanese, and South Korean investors. The funds raised will be directed towards growth investments and investor rewards.

Corsair Gaming was founded as Corsair Microsystems in 1994 originally selling cache modules before switching to DRAM after the incorporation of L2 cache in processors, since then Corsair has continued to expand its product lineup now offering a wide range of PC components and peripherals. In 2017 private equity firm EagleTree Capital acquired a majority stake of the company in a deal valued at $525 million. In recent years Corsair has been acquiring various gaming brands such as Elgato, ORIGIN PC, and SCUF Gaming, these acquisitions have likely left the company with significant loans to repay.

Corsair Gaming has recently filed an initial public offering with a target price of $100 million and will be treated as an emerging growth company. The company intends to list on the Nasdaq under the CRSR symbol. The IPO filing offers some insight into the financial position of Corsair however, many exact dollar values have been withheld in the public filing. Corsair Gaming has sold over 190 million products since 1998 with 85 million of those being sold in the last five years.

Arm co-founder Hermann Hauser recently gave an interview to BBC where he expressed some concerns regarding the prospective buy acquisition from NVIDIA, which has been in talks with Arm owner Softbank towards the IP-designer's acquisition. As Hauser puts it, "It's one of the fundamental assumptions of the ARM business model that it can sell to everybody," Hauser told BCC, "The one saving grace about Softbank was that it wasn't a chip company, and retained ARM neutrality. If it becomes part of Nvidia, most of the licensees are competitors of Nvidia, and will of course then look for an alternative to ARM."

Hauser doesn't think the NVIDIA deal will follow through due to these aspects of the chip design ecosystem, with many Arm clients - such as Intel, Apple, Qualcomm, TSMC, Samsung, among others - being direct or otherwise indirect competitors to NVIDIA. Hauser thinks that Arm would be much better served through a British government intervention in bringing the company back towards the British fold: "The great opportunity that the cash needs of Softbank presents is to bring ARM back home and take it public, with the support of the British government." The Softbank acquisition occurred back in 2016 and cost the company some $24 billion; however, recent estimates from New Street Research LLP placed Arm's valuation at USD $44 billion if its IPO took off in 2021, and as much as $68 billion by 2025.

It was reported last week that NVIDIA is "interested" in acquiring UK chip-design firm Arm from Japan's SoftBank that holds a treasure chest of tech IP. Now Bloomberg reports that things are getting serious between NVIDIA and SoftBank, with the two reportedly engaged in "advanced talks" over the possible acquisition of Arm by NVIDIA. The graphics and scalar compute giant recently surpassed Intel in market capitalization.

With a few quick moves, NVIDIA stands a real chance of displacing Intel as makers of the world's most popular CPU machine architecture, driven mainly by smartphones, tablets, networking infrastructure, wearables, and IoT devices. The Arm architecture is also taking strides into the server space, and Apple recently decided to dump Intel x86 in favor of Arm-powered homebrew SoCs. Arm could cost NVIDIA an arm and a leg. New Street Research LLP estimated Arm's valuation at USD $44 billion if its IPO took off in 2021, and as much as $68 billion by 2025.

According to the report from The Wall Street Journal, we have obtained information that SoftBank, owner of Arm Holdings, is considering a future of Arm Holdings without SoftBank's ownership. The report is indicating that SoftBank can either sell its subsidiary or make it go to public with Initial Public Offering (IPO). If we recall, SoftBank has purchased Arm Holdings in 2016 for 32 billion USD, and the company is potentially worth much more today. Arm Holdings was established as a joint between Acorn Computers, Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.), and VLSI Technology. The news of SoftBank selling Arm Holdings is coming just after Apple decided to make a Mac based on Arm ISA.

The report from WSJ says that the market interest for such acquisition is unknown, so there is a big possibility that SoftBank will ultimately do nothing and just keep the company. My speculations could be that Apple may have an interest in the company since it is using its royalties and intellectual property. If such a thing happens Apple would be forced to sign a deal by antitrust regulators that force the company to continue offering to license the ISA. After all, Apple was one of the founding members of the joint venture. The possibility of that is of course very low. If another option such as IPO happens, the company would still be in ownership of SoftBank, it would just go to the public trading market.

GlobalFoundries is planning to sell a minority stake in the company through an IPO (initial public offering) in 2022, company CEO Tom Caulfield told the Wall Street Journal. In February, it was reported that with the discontinuation of the 7 nm development and sale of certain facilities, the perception was made that GloFo was looking to be acquired by another semiconductor company. The same course of actions could have also served as prelude to taking the company public, and as it turns out, GloFo is heading toward the latter.

TimesUnion comments that the decision to discontinue 7 nm development and shedding some assets slowed down development of future technologies, but returned the company to profitability, so it could be put up for an IPO. Caulfield didn't comment on what is the size of the stake sale, but the source comments it could be aimed at alleviating the strain on GloFo's original investors, the Abu Dhabi government, which has invested over $21 billion in the company over the past 10 years. GlobalFoundries was formed as AMD spun off its semiconductor business in 2009, with seed capital from the Abu Dhabi government. Over the decade, the company built fabs in New York state, and acquired fabs across Vermont, and Singapore, along with tech acquisition from IBM.

The Financial Times has reported that Toshiba is considering a last-ditch effort towards producing liquidity, should its memory chip production business spin-off to Bain Capital not be allowed to complete prior to the end of March, in the face of antitrust scrutiny delays. Should that be the case, Toshiba would be in a dire situation, as the spin-off development has clearly shown (remember that Toshiba went from a 20% stake spin-off to a 100% spin-off due to increasing concerns with the company's outstanding debt and lack of liquidity).

Should that be the case, the company is reportedly considering an IPO as one of its contingency plans, the Financial Times reports, citing sources familiar with the plans. If the acquisition by Bain Capital fails to win regulatory approval by March 31, Toshiba is no longer bound to the deal's terms, sources familiar with the situation have told Reuters. The Financial Times further added that some analysts - and Toshiba shareholders - favor this contingency plan over the existing deal - and apparently there's some sentiment towards the same in the financial markets at large, as Toshiba shares hit a three-month high in morning trade, at one point rising as much as 4.7 percent, after these IPO plans started being made public. If Toshiba's board wasn't considering an IPO before, they sure are more likely to do so now.

News agency Reuters recently reported that hardware giant Corsair was in talks with middle market private equity firm EagleTree Capital for acquisition of the company in its entirety. The deal was reported by Reuters as being valued at close to $500 million. Part of the Corsair brand is, and continues to be, owned by Corsair founder and Chief Executive Andy Paul, who founded the company in 1994. Another part of it, however, is currently owned by Francisco Partners, an American private equity firm focused exclusively on investments in technology and technology-enabled services. In 2013, Francisco Partners made a $75 million investment in the company, after Corsair scrapped its IPO plans.

However, an industry source has shed some more light on the matter. The source (singular, since we couldn't verify this through multiple channels) told TPU that it isn't the entirety of Corsair that's for sale; only the share previously acquired by Francisco Partners. It's this particular stake that's being eyed by EagleTree Capital - probably at a much higher valuation than the initial $75 million investment. As always, you should take this current information with a grain of salt.

Razer is apparently looking towards raising some more liquidity towards its coffers. Remember that Razer is the company that recently acquired certification-experts THX. Even though having a THX certification today doesn't have the same weight as it did some years ago, Razer has started taking the first steps towards integration of the certification with its products, in a bid to have yet another selling badge to appeal to customers. These $600m are being destined to future growth (particularly in Asian markets), as well as an attempt to "Broaden the appeal of [Razer's] brand; (...) continue to introduce innovative, category-defining experiences; and deepen global market penetration."

Razer's recent financial filings indicate Razer operated at a $20m profit in 2012-2013, but ran a loss of ~$70m in 2015-2016 because of multiple acquisitions as well as a tripling in R&D activities. These increased spendings weren't accompanied by an equivalent increase in revenue, however, hence why 2015-2016 ended up in the red. This doesn't mean the company is in bad shape, though: it's just that R&D, as well as an increasing presence in physical stores, all take up money in the short term, while arguably having more effects in the long term.