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Billionaire Masayoshi Son, chairman and chief executive officer of SoftBank Group Corp., speaks in front of a screen displaying the ARM Holdings logo during a news conference in Tokyo on July 28, 2016.

Tomohiro Ohsumi | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Arm, which is owned by SoftBank, filed for its initial public offering Monday. The firm’s stock market debut will be a major test for the IPO market, which has more or less closed off from new listings due to rising interest rates which have hammered appetite for risky assets in the last year or so.

Arm is one of the most important companies in technology. Its chip designs found in nearly all the world’s smartphones, including Apple iPhones and most Android devices. Its debut will be a big deal for an IPO market that’s been in the doldrums since 2022, but the company’s listing has big implications for SoftBank as well.

SoftBank has been attempting to bounce back from a grim tech market by reining in on its growth-focused investments and pivoting its focus to artificial intelligence, the hot topic of the hour in tech.

What is Arm?

Arm, which is headquartered in Cambridge, England, designed the architecture of chips found in 99% of all smartphones.

The company traces its history to an early computing company known as Acorn Computers. In 1990, Acorn spun out a new company named Advanced RISC Machines, structured as a joint venture between Acorn, Apple and U.S. chipmaker VLSI Technology.

Arm isn’t a chipmaker itself. Rather, the company is responsible for coming up with the “architectures” — or overall designs, including components and programming language instructions that other companies use to build chips. Its original value was designing chips with extremely low energy consumption compared with the X86 chips common in personal computers at the time. It’s seen as something of a neutral party or “Switzerland” in tech, since its designs are used in nearly smartphone processors, including those made by Apple, and increasingly, server and laptop processors as well.

It’s also often considered the crown jewel of the U.K.’s technology sector.

Speaking with CNBC at a developer conference in October 2022, Arm CEO Rene Haas said that companies can’t afford not to work with the company, given its technology is embedded in virtually every device out there.

SoftBank's Arm prepares to file for IPO status today

“Given the fact that we license the technology to all the major players in the industry, no one can really afford to miss a product cycle or scale back on R&D or not do a product,” Haas said at the time.

Arm’s business model is to license the intellectual property for these architectures so that they can build systems around them. In recent years, ARM has tried to sell its own designs for processors, a more lucrative business than just licensing the underlying architecture technology.

SoftBank agreed to acquire Arm in 2016 for $32 billion, which at the time was the biggest-ever purchase of a European technology company. SoftBank at the time said it was acquiring the business to gain a foothold in the growing internet of things sector. IoT, is a small part of the firm’s business, but at the time it was a much-hyped part of tech.

Not just for wearables or smart home appliances, Arm has been expanding its semiconductors to other uses such as connected cars.

For the quarter ended June 30, the company generated 88.5 billion Japanese yen ($605.5 million), according to an earnings release from SoftBank.

But the company is also facing headwinds from a slowdown in demand for products like smartphones, which has hit chip firms across the board. Arm’s net sales fell 4.6% year-on-year in the second quarter.

The unit also swung to a 9.5 billion yen loss, having made a profit of 29.8 billion yen in the same period a year earlier.

Beleaguered sale to Nvidia

SoftBank originally tried to sell Arm to chip giant Nvidia, but the deal faced pushback from regulators, who raised concerns over competition and national security. Nvidia is a behemoth in the world of semiconductors, and the company is now benefiting heavily from the boom in AI applications as demand for its GPUs soars.

Since then, SoftBank has opted to list Arm as an independent company. The Japanese tech investing giant is reportedly looking to purchase the remaining 25% stake in Arm that it does not currently own from its massive $100 billion Vision Fund.

Arm is only a part of the whole investment universe of SoftBank, says portfolio manager

In the U.K., which has sought to boost its domestic chip industry through up to £1 billion ($1.3 billion) in investments, Arm is seen as strategically important.

The change of the company’s ownership to foreign hands is seen as a thorny topic for the domestic tech industry, not least due to concerns that it undermines the U.K.’s “tech sovereignty,” an issue that has cropped up throughout Europe as officials look to reduce dependence on technology from the U.S. and other nations.

The government had pushed aggressively for Arm to list in London, however the company opted to go with New York for its debut instead, dealing a blow to the London stock exchange.

Testing a choppy IPO market

SoftBank is pushing ahead with a listing of Arm even as U.S. markets have been in an unsteady state. Technology valuations have fallen sharply from the peak of the 2021 tech boom.

That year, shares of newly minted public companies such as Palantir and UiPath rose to seismic levels as investors grew excited by their growth prospects in the boom times.

Arm filed confidentially for a listing in the U.S. earlier this year. It’s not yet clear what valuation SoftBank is seeking for Arm, however reports have pegged the prospective market value at between $60 billion and $70 billion.

As well as being a bellwether for the chip industry, Arm plays a role in the AI space — and is increasingly touting itself as an AI company. Investors will be watching out for the company’s S-1 filing to see how it sees the technology benefiting its business over time.

In May, Arm unveiled two new chipsets targeted at machine learning applications. One, a new CPU called Cortex-4, is a chipset that delivers faster machine-learning performance and consumes 40% less power than its predecessor, according to Arm. The other, a GPU called G720, offers better performance and uses up 22% less memory bandwidth than its predecessor, Arm said.

“Arm remains committed to developing and testing our GPUs against new applications for machine learning (ML),” the company said in a May 29 blog post announcing the products.

High-powered chips such as those offered by Nvidia and AMD are crucial to AI applications, which require lots of computing power to run smoothly. Earlier this month, Nvidia unveiled its new Grace Hopper chip for generative AI applications, which is based on Arm architecture.

SoftBank is banking on the growth in AI to lift the prospects of its Vision Fund, which has flagged in tandem with souring bets on firms like WeWork, China’s ride-hailing giant Didi Global, and Uber, the latter of which the Vision Fund has since shed its holdings.

CAVA posts revenue profits in its first quarter since going public

SoftBank’s CFO Yoshimitsu Goto said during the company’s June quarter earnings call that the company has been “carefully and slowly emerging back to investment activity,” with a focus on AI investments.

SoftBank said its Vision Fund booked an investment gain of 159.8 billion yen, its first gain in five consecutive quarters. SoftBank said the fund mainly benefited from investments in its own subsidiaries — including Arm.

That still came after SoftBank’s Vision Fund reported a record 4.3 trillion yen loss in the fiscal year ending Mar. 31.

The Japanese tech giant has been starting to talk up its investments in AI recently. In July, the company led a $65 million investment in U.K. insurance technology company Tractable.

– CNBC’s Kif Leswing contributed to this story.

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Stablecoin issuer Circle applies for a national bank charter

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Stablecoin issuer Circle applies for a national bank charter

Traders work on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), on the day of Circle Internet Group’s IPO, in New York City, U.S., June 5, 2025.

Brendan McDermid | Reuters

Stablecoin issuer Circle Internet Group has applied for a national trust bank charter, moving forward on its mission to bring stablecoins into the traditional financial world after the firm’s big market debut this month, CNBC confirmed.

Shares rose 1% after hours.

If the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency grants the bank charter, Circle will establish the First National Digital Currency Bank, N.A. Under the charter, Circle, which issues the USDC stablecoin, will also be able to offer custody services in the future to institutional clients for assets, which could include representations of stocks and bonds on a blockchain network.

Reuters first reported on Circle’s bank charter application.

There are no plans to change the management of Circle’s USDC reserves, which are currently held with other major banks.

Anchorage Digital is the only other crypto company to obtain such a license.

Circle’s move comes after a wildly successful IPO and debut trading month on the public markets. Shares of the company are up 484% in June. The company is also benefiting from a wave of optimism after the Senate’s passage of the GENIUS Act, which would give the U.S. a regulatory framework for stablecoins.

Having a federally regulated trust charter would also help Circle meet requirements under the GENIUS Act.

“Establishing a national digital currency trust bank of this kind marks a significant milestone in our goal to build an internet financial system that is transparent, efficient and accessible,” Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire said in a statement shared with CNBC. “By applying for a national trust charter, Circle is taking proactive steps to further strengthen our USDC infrastructure.”

“Further, we will align with emerging U.S. regulation for the issuance and operation of dollar-denominated payment stablecoins, which we believe can enhance the reach and resilience of the U.S. dollar, and support the development of crucial, market neutral infrastructure for the world’s leading institutions to build on,” he said.

Don’t miss these cryptocurrency insights from CNBC Pro:

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Meta shares hit all-time high as Mark Zuckerberg goes on AI hiring blitz

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Meta shares hit all-time high as Mark Zuckerberg goes on AI hiring blitz

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during the Meta Connect event on Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024.

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images


Meta shares hit a record high on Monday, underscoring investor interest in the company’s new AI superintelligence group.

The company’s shares reached $747.90 during midday trading, topping Meta’s previous stock market record in February when it began laying off the 5% of its workforce that it deemed “low performers.”

Meta joins Microsoft and Nvidia among tech megacaps that have reached new highs of late, all closing at records Monday. Apple, Amazon, Alphabet and Tesla remain below their all-time highs reached late last year or early this year.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been on an AI hiring blitz amid fierce competition with rivals such as OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet. Earlier in June, Meta said it would hire Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and some of his colleagues as part of a $14.3 billion investment into the executive’s data labeling and annotation startup.

The social media company also hired Nat Friedman and his business partner, Daniel Gross, the chief of Safe Superintelligence, an AI startup with a valuation of $32 billion, CNBC reported on June 19. Meta’s attempts to buy Safe Superintelligence were rebuffed by the startup’s founder and AI expert Ilya Sutskever, the report noted.

Wang and Friedman are the leaders of Meta’s new Superintelligence Labs, tasked with overseeing the company’s artificial intelligence foundation models, projects and research, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC. The term superintelligence refers to technology that exceeds human capability.

Bloomberg News first reported about the new superintelligence unit.

Meta has also snatched AI researchers from OpenAI. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, said during a podcast that Meta was offering signing bonuses as high as $100 million.

Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s technology chief, spoke about the social media company’s AI hiring spree during a June 20 interview with CNBC’s “Closing Bell Overtime,” saying that the talent market is “really incredible and kind of unprecedented in my 20-year career as a technology executive.”

WATCH: Meta’s AI talent spending spree

Meta escalated talent war with OpenAI

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Joby Aviation stock pops 12% after delivering first flying taxi to UAE

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Joby Aviation stock pops 12% after delivering first flying taxi to UAE

An electric air taxi by Joby Aviation flies near the Downtown Manhattan Heliport in Manhattan, New York City, U.S., November 12, 2023. 

Roselle Chen | Reuters

Joby Aviation stock soared about 12% as the flying air taxi maker got closer to launching a service in the United Arab Emirates.

The electric vertical takeoff and landing, or eVTOL, company said Monday that it delivered its first aircraft to the UAE and has completed piloted flight tests as it readies for a 2026 launch in the region.

“Our flights and operational footprint in Dubai are a monumental step toward weaving air taxi services into the fabric of daily life worldwide,” said founder and CEO JoeBen Bevirt in a release. He called the Middle East nation a “launchpad for a global revolution in how we move.”

Joby’s planned launch in the UAE was announced in February 2024 as part of an agreement with Dubai’s Road and Transport Authority. The deal included exclusive rights to conduct air taxi service in Dubai for six years.

Read more CNBC tech news

As part of the project, Joby said in November that it began building one vertiport at Dubai International Airport, with three additional locations slated for Palm Jumeirah and Dubai’s downtown and marina. Joby also announced an air taxi agreement with three Abu Dhabi government departments in 2024.

The California-based company has made other expansion moves in the Middle East. Shares jumped earlier this month after Saudi Arabian firm Abdul Latif Jameel announced a roughly $1 billion investment for up to 300 eVTOLs. The firm participated in Joby’s Series C funding round.

Joby shares have surged more than 32% this year, swelling its market capitalization to over $9 billion.

Demand for air taxis, which take off and land similar to helicopters, has gained momentum in recent years. The service faces regulatory and safety hurdles but has been lauded for its ability to cut traffic congestion and slash emissions.

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that included a pilot program for testing electric air taxis.

WATCH: Joby Aviation shares pop on Saudi Investment

Joby Aviation shares pop on Saudi Investment

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