Arm is preparing for a blockbuster initial public offering at a time when investors are very interested in both semiconductors and artificial intelligence.
Nvidia’s 200% rally this year is evidence of this. Arm is looking to raise nearly $5 billion from the IPO which would value it at over $50 billion. And demand is high with Reuters reporting that the company could price its shares at the top of its indicated range or possibly even above it.
Part of that may be down to Softbank, the owner of Arm, and its positioning of the British chip designer as an AI play. Arm will be “central” to the transition to AI-enabled computing, the company said in its IPO prospectus.
But the company is a different proposition to Nvidia and is unlikely to see the benefits of the AI boom in the near-term, analysts told CNBC.
Nvidia vs. Arm: A comparison
AI has been thrust into the spotlight, in large part thanks to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. This is a technology known as generative AI because the AI is able to generate answers in response to user prompts.
Such an AI is based on a model which is trained on huge amounts of data. A vast amount of computing power is required to train these AI models.
Nvidia designs a type of semiconductor called a graphics processing unit or GPU, which go into data centers to train and run these AI models.
Arm, meanwhile, is a company that designs the blueprint or “architectures” of certain semiconductors. These architectures are the overall designs, including components and programming language instructions that other companies use to build chips. Arm mainly designs central processing units or CPUs.
Arm-based CPUs are in 99% of the world’s smartphones including from major players like Apple.
While CPUs are also required in the data center, they’re often used in conjunction with a GPU to train data, but not always.
Arm makes most of its money from royalties and licensing its architecture. More than 50% of this revenue comes from smartphones and consumer electronics. So far, it is not seeing a big boost from AI.
“Growth in the near term for Arm is really not about AI, it’s about mobile, it’s about royalty increases,” Jamie Mills O’Brien, investment director at Abrdn, told CNBC’s “Street Signs Europe” on Monday.
“In the longer term, I think Arm is trying to focus investors minds on the potential … AI in the edge, AI in the data center, but at the moment that’s not a huge part of the company’s exposure.”
Arm’s future in AI
Arm’s AI future is unlikely to come from the huge amounts of chips required to train big data models.
Instead, it’s more likely to be a major player in AI on the “edge.” This phrase refers to AI processes carried out on a device, such as a smartphone, rather than in the cloud, like ChatGPT.
For this to happen, devices will require low-power but high-performance chips able to carry out the computing required for AI applications. Arm is designing the architecture for these chips.
“If you’re doing AI on a smartphone or car you’re not going to have that same level of compute power, so you need to optimize the model to run locally,” Peter Richardson, research director at Counterpoint Research, told CNBC.
“Those processors will almost certainly be Arm-based”
Arm said in its IPO filing that its processors already run AI workloads “and every smartphone currently in the market efficiently runs AI inference applications, such as voice recognition and applying filters to digital images.”
However, Arm is unlikely to see the benefit from AI filter through to its revenue for at least three-to-five years, Richard Windsor, founder of Radio Free Mobile, told CNBC.
What SoftBank has been required to do is to sell Arm as an AI company like Nvidia,” Windsor said.
“Now, in the long term absolutely, I’m a big proponent on running AI on end-devices, it makes an awful lot of economic sense for the provider of the service, and also much more in general in terms of the quality of the service, privacy and security and so on and so forth. But those revenues are not accruing to Arm right now.”
Baidu will bring its driverless taxis to Europe next year via a partnership with U.S. ridehailing firm Lyft, as the Chinese tech giant looks to expand its autonomous vehicles globally.
The robotaxis will initially be deployed in the U.K. and Germany from 2026 with the aim to have “thousands” of vehicles across Europe in the “following years,” the two companies said.
Lyft has had very little presence in Europe until last week when it closed the acquisition of Germany-based ride hailing company FreeNow, which is available in over 150 cities across nine countries, including Ireland, the U.K., Germany and France.
Deployment of the autonomous cars is “pending regulatory approval,” Lyft and Baidu said in a Monday statement. It’s unclear if Lyft will offer Baidu’s robotaxis via the FreeNow app or another product.
The partnership marks a continued push from Baidu to expand its robotaxis to international markets.
Last month, Baidu partnered with Uber to deploy its autonomous cars on the ride-hailing giant’s platform outside the U.S. and mainland China, with a focus on the Middle East and Asia, which will launch later this year. The partnership also covers Europe, though a launch date for the region has not yet been disclosed.
In China, Baidu has been operating its own robotaxi service since 2021 in major cities like Beijing, allowing users to hail an Apollo Go car through the app. Meanwhile, for Lyft, the deal could boost the firm’s presence in the region as it looks to take on rivals like Uber and Bolt.
Autonomous vehicles have become a big focus for ride-hailing companies which have looked to partner with companies that are developing the technology for driverless cars.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk was awarded an interim pay package of 96 million shares of the company over the weekend. The shares would be worth about $29 billion.
The company said in a filing Sunday that the pay package would vest in two years as long as Musk continued as CEO or in another key executive position.
The new award would be forfeited if the legal battle over his 2018 compensation ends with Musk being able to exercise the larger pay package, which was valued at $56 billion.
In January, Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick upheld a prior ruling in the case, Tornetta v. Musk, that the compensation plan was improperly granted. Tesla shareholders approved the pay package in June 2024.
The case is now before the Delaware Supreme Court.
Musk’s 2018 pay package included a set of performance targets for the company, which were all achieved.
The judge called it “the largest potential compensation opportunity ever observed in public markets” in her January decision and said it was 33 times higher than the nearest comparison, which was Musk’s prior compensation package.
Harvey co-founders Winston Weinberg and Gabe Pereyra
Courtesy of Harvey
Artificial intelligence startup Harvey on Monday announced it has reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue, or ARR, just three years after its launch.
Harvey runs an AI-powered legal platform for lawyers at law firms and large corporations. Its technology can help with legal research, drafting and diligence projects, and the company is also building industry-specific use cases.
Winston Weinberg, co-founder and CEO of Harvey, said the startup’s ARR milestone has largely been driven by usage. Harvey has surpassed 500 customers, including CNBC’s parent company, Comcast, and its weekly average users have quadrupled over the past year, the startup said.
“Most of our accounts grow pretty massively,” Weinberg told CNBC. “You’ll sell to a Comcast or to a law firm, and they’ll buy a couple hundred seats, and then they expand that usage pretty quickly.”
Weinberg is a former lawyer, and he co-founded Harvey with his friend and roommate Gabe Pereyra, a former research scientist at Google DeepMind and Meta. The pair launched the company in 2022 after experimenting with OpenAI’s large language model GPT-3, which came out before its viral AI chatbot, ChatGPT.
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The company’s name, Harvey, is partially inspired by one of the main characters in “Suits,” a legal drama TV series, Weinberg said.
Harvey has raised more than $800 million from investors, according to PitchBook, including Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital and the OpenAI Startup Fund. The company also earned a spot on the 2025 CNBC Disruptor 50 list.
“With gen AI, and how fast everything’s moving, you just have to learn how to scale really, really fast,” Weinberg said. “I’d say, like every six months I go through a new scaling experience.”
In the months ahead, Weinberg said Harvey is focused on its global expansion and continuing to build out its team. The startup recently hired Siva Gurumurthy, the former director of engineering at Twitter, as its chief technology officer, and John Haddock, who spent a decade at Stripe, as its chief business officer.
Weinberg said he has learned to appreciate the value of a strong team, especially during periods of rapid growth.
“We’re starting to get to the point where we have really good leadership in place,” Weinberg said. “That just changes your ability to scale to such a massive degree.”
Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal, which owns CNBC.