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SoftBank has stopped working on a London initial public offering for chip designer Arm because of political upheaval in the British government, the Financial Times reported.

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British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak reportedly reopened negotiations with the CEOs of SoftBank and Arm, in a renewed attempt to have the chip designer list its shares in London.

A meeting was held last month by Sunak with Arm CEO Rene Haas and the firm’s chief legal officer, Spencer Collins, according to a Financial Times report, citing anonymous sources familiar with the matter.

SoftBank founder and CEO Masayoshi Son joined the meeting via video, the report said.

Also in attendance was Andrew Griffith, the city minister, the FT reported.

Spokespeople for the U.K.’s Treasury department and Arm declined to comment when asked about the report by CNBC. SoftBank was not immediately available for comment.

Sunak is the third British prime minister to try to convince SoftBank to list its Arm division in the U.K. since a proposed buyout of Arm by Nvidia was scrapped.

In May, former PM Boris Johnson wrote to SoftBank appealing for the Japanese firm to list Arm in London. Liz Truss, who was the U.K. leader for all of 44 days, also tried to renew talks in September.

With 6,000 staff globally and 3,000 in the U.K., Arm is widely regarded as the jewel in the crown of the British tech industry.

SoftBank, which bought Arm for $32 billion in 2016, was originally aiming to sell it to U.S. chipmaking giant Nvidia. However, that deal unraveled early last year after competition regulators sought to block it on antitrust grounds.

Cambridge-based Arm is a major force in the semiconductor market, licensing its microchip designs to some of the world’s largest consumer tech manufacturers. Around 95% of smartphones globally, including Apple’s iPhone, contain Arm-based processors.

London has relaxed its listings rules in an effort to attract leading global tech companies to go public in the U.K.

But it faces barriers, with venture capitalists often complaining of a lack of understanding of often lossmaking tech ventures. Last year, funds raised by firms listing in London plunged 90% amid a broader market cooldown.

European startups tend to choose New York over regional markets for their IPOs, citing better familiarity from deep-pocketed institutional investors with the growth-hungry tech sector.

Arm, which was spun out of an early computing company called Acorn Computers in 1990, originally went public on the London Stock Exchange in 1998 but was delisted after it was acquired by SoftBank in 2016.

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Peter Thiel just bought a big stake in Tom Lee’s ether company and the shares are surging

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Peter Thiel just bought a big stake in Tom Lee's ether company and the shares are surging

Peter Thiel, president and founder of Clarium Capital Management LLC, holds hundred dollars bills as he speaks during the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami, Florida, U.S., on Thursday, April 7, 2022. 

Eva Marie Uzcategui | Bloomberg | Getty Images

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Bitmine (BMNR) 1-month

The current wave of interest in Ethereum and related assets follows an announcement by Robinhood that it will enable trading of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs across Europe, and a groundswell of interest in stablecoins throughout June following Circle’s wildly successful IPO and ongoing progress in Congress on the Senate’s proposed stablecoin bill, the GENIUS Act.

The price of ether itself also continued its rally, up more than 4% Wednesday. The coin has doubled in price in the past three months.

Thiel is a venture capitalist and hedge fund manager best known as a cofounder of both PayPal and Palantir and an early investor in Facebook. Founders Fund was an investor in Tagomi, the crypto brokerage acquired by Coinbase in 2020, and Polymarket, the prediction market built on Ethereum.

Don’t miss these cryptocurrency insights from CNBC Pro:

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sells another $37 million worth of stock

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sells another  million worth of stock

NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang speaks during the NVIDIA GTC Paris keynote, part of the 9th edition of the VivaTech technology startup and innovation fair, held at the Dôme de Paris in the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 11, 2025.

Mustafa Yalcin | Anadolu | Getty Images

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sold another 225,000 shares of the chipmaker, totaling about $37 million, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

The sale comes as part of a plan adopted in March for Huang to sell up to 6 million shares of the leading artificial intelligence company. Huang began trading stock last month. His most recent sale, disclosed last Friday, totaled 225,000 shares, or about $36 million.

Since he began selling stock this year, Huang has unloaded 1.2 million shares, totaling about $190 million, according to InsiderScore. In last year’s prearranged plan, Huang cashed in over $700 million.

AI demand and the need for graphics processing units powering large language models have spiked Huang’s net worth and propelled Nvidia past a $4 trillion market capitalization, making it the most valuable company.

That surge in value has put Huang above Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett in net worth on Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index.

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In another significant win, Nvidia said this week that it plans to soon restart sales of its H20 chips to China after the Trump administration indicated that it would approve export licenses.

Earlier this year, the administration said Nvidia would need a license approval to ship the chips, designed specifically for China.

“The U.S. government has assured NVIDIA that licenses will be granted, and NVIDIA hopes to start deliveries soon,” the company said in a statement Tuesday.

Huang said during a press conference on Wednesday in Beijing, China, that he wants to sell chips more advanced than the H20 to China at some point.

Huang wasn’t the only stakeholder to unload Nvidia shares. Board member Brooke Seawell sold $16 million worth of stock.

WATCH: H20 news should add 10% to Nvidia’s street estimates, says Deepwater’s Gene Munster

H20 news should add 10% to Nvidia’s street estimates, says Deepwater's Gene Munster

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wants to sell more advanced chips to China after H20 ban is lifted

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wants to sell more advanced chips to China after H20 ban is lifted

Jensen Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., speaks to members of the media in Beijing, China, on Wednesday, July 16, 2025.

Na Bian | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Nvidia is looking to ship more advanced chips to China than its current generation, CEO Jensen Huang said on Wednesday, as he looks to revitalize sales in the world’s second-largest economy.

The comments come after Nvidia said on Monday that it will resume sales of its H20 artificial intelligence chip to China, reversing a previous ban. The H20 is a less-advanced semiconductor designed for AI workloads that comply with U.S. export restrictions to China.

“I hope to get more advanced chips into China than the H20,” Huang said during a press conference in Beijing, China, in response to a CNBC question.

“And the reason for that is because technology is always moving on … today Hopper’s terrific but some years from now we will have more and more and better and better technology, and I think it’s sensible that whatever we’re allowed to sell in China will continue to get better and better over time as well,” he said referencing Hopper, Nvidia’s chip architecture that the H20 is built on.

Nvidia has been caught in the crosshairs of U.S.-China tensions over trade and technology. The tech giant has faced several rounds of restrictions that have forced it to restrict access of its most advanced chips to China. In response, Nvidia has developed semiconductors that comply with export restrictions, such as the H20.

Nvidia took a $4.5 billion writedown on the unsold H20 inventory in May and said sales in its last financial quarter would have been $2.5 billion higher without any export curbs.

Huang has trod a fine line between praising U.S. President Donald Trump’s policies regarding reshoring chip manufacturing to America while also lobbying for change on curbs to China.

If all the AI developers are in China, the China stack is going to win, Nvidia CEO tells CNBC

The Nvidia boss has argued the Chinese AI market could be worth $50 billion in the next two-to-three years and that it would be a “tremendous loss” for American firms not to be part of that. Huang also told CNBC this year that Nvidia’s Chinese rival Huawei has “got China covered” if U.S. firms can’t participate in the market.

“Export control are things that are outside of our control and they can be quite disruptive to our business. It is our job only to inform the governments of the nature and the unintended consequences of the policies that they make,” Huang said during his visit to Beijing.

Nvidia has also laid out a roadmap to release more advanced chips, though it remains unclear if the U.S. government would allow Nvidia to sell more advanced products to Chinese companies. However, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested on Tuesday that the government would continue to allow chip sales to China so that companies in the market rely on American technology.

“The idea is the Chinese are more than capable of building their own,” Lutnick told CNBC. “You want to keep one step ahead of what they can build, so they keep buying our chips.”

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