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In this photo illustration, Nvidia logo is seen displayed on a smartphone screen in front of ARM logo.

Pavlo Gonchar | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

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.

The soaring interest in generative AI has seen Nvidia’s earnings surge.

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”

Lack of JV control and economic weakness among risks as Arm enters China: Expert

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.”

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Ether rises to a fresh record, bitcoin erases gains from Jackson Hole rally

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Ether rises to a fresh record, bitcoin erases gains from Jackson Hole rally

Jakub Porzycki | NurPhoto | Getty Images

Ether rose to a new record over the weekend, after hitting an all-time high Friday for the first time since 2021.

The price of the second largest cryptocurrency rose as high as $4,954.81 on Sunday afternoon. It was last higher by less than 1% at $4,776.46.

Meanwhile, bitcoin at one point erased all the gains from its Friday rally, falling as low as $110,779.01, its lowest level since July 10. It was last trading lower by nearly 2% at about $112,000. The flagship cryptocurrency hit its most recent record of $124,496 on Aug. 13.

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Ether (ETH) and bitcoin (BTC)

On Friday, crypto rocketed with the broader market after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell hinted at upcoming rate cuts and investors returned to risk-on mode. Ether surged 15% and bitcoin gained 4%.

Ether, rather than bitcoin, has been leading the crypto marker for several weeks thanks to regulatory tailwinds, a boom in interest in stablecoins and buying en masse by a new cohort of corporate ether accumulators. On Saturday, Bitmine Immersion Technologies, the ether treasury company chaired by Wall Street bull Tom Lee, bought $45 million of ether, according to crypto data provider Arkham.

That shift in leadership has helped sustain ETH, which has sustained the $4,000 level this month after unsuccessfully testing the resistance mark a handful of times since 2021.

“The buyers are finally bigger than the sellers,” said Ben Kurland, CEO at crypto research platform DYOR. “ETH ETFs are drawing steady inflows, and public companies are beginning to treat ETH as a treasury asset they can stake for yield — a stickier form of demand than retail speculation.”

“Additionally, nearly a third of supply is locked in staking, scaling solutions are mature and, with rate cuts back on the table, the cost of capital is falling,” he added. “Those forces turned $4,000 from a resistance level into a foundation for re-pricing ETH’s next chapter.”

Don’t miss these cryptocurrency insights from CNBC Pro:

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How the U.S. space industry became dependent on SpaceX

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How the U.S. space industry became dependent on SpaceX

SpaceX is valued at around $400 billion and is critical for U.S. space access, but it wasn’t always the powerhouse that it is today.

Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002. Using money that he made from the sale of PayPal, Musk and his new company developed their first rocket, the Falcon 1, to challenge existing launch providers.

“There were actually a lot of startup aerospace companies looking to take on this market. They recognized we had a monopoly provider called United Launch Alliance. They had merged the Boeing and Lockheed rocket launch capacity to one company, and they were charging the government hundreds of millions of dollars to launch satellites,” said Lori Garver, a former deputy administrator at NASA.

In 2003, Musk paraded Falcon 1 around the streets of Washington hoping to attract the attention of government agencies and the multi-million dollar contracts that they offered. It worked, and in 2004, SpaceX secured a few million dollars from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, and the U.S. Air Force to further develop its rockets.

Despite the government support, the company struggled. Its first three launches of the Falcon 1 failed to reach orbit.

“NASA, and specifically the the initial commercial cargo contract, is what saved the company when it was on the brink of bankruptcy,” said Chris Quilty, president and Co-CEO of Quilty Space, a space-focused research firm.

NASA awarded the $1.6 billion contract, known as Commercial Resupply Services to SpaceX in 2008, just months after the first successful flight of the Falcon 1. The contract called on SpaceX to use its new rocket, the Falcon 9, along with its Dragon capsule to ferry cargo and supplies to the International Space Station over the course of 12 missions. In 2014, SpaceX won another NASA contract worth $2.6 billion to develop and operate vehicles to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

Today, SpaceX dominates large parts of the space market from launch to satellites. In 2024, SpaceX conducted a record-breaking 134 orbital launches, more than double the amount of launches done by the next most prolific launch provider, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, according to science and technology consulting firm BryceTech. These 134 launches accounted for 83% of all spacecraft launched last year. According to a July report by Bloomberg, SpaceX was valued at $400 billion.

SpaceX’s Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 rocket are the primary means by which NASA launches astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station. The company’s Starlink satellites have become indispensable for providing internet access to remote areas as well as to U.S. allies during wartime. The company’s Starship rocket, though still in testing, is also key to the U.S. plan to return to the moon. SpaceX is also building a network of spy satellites for the U.S. government called Starshield as part of a $1.8 billion contract. Even competitors including Amazon and OneWeb have launched their satellites on SpaceX rockets. 

“The ecosystem of space is changed by, really it’s SpaceX,” Garver said. “The lower cost of access to space is doing what we had dreamed of. It is built up a whole community of companies around the world that now have access to space.”

Watch the video to find out more.

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Cybersecurity firm Netskope files to go public on the Nasdaq

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Cybersecurity firm Netskope files to go public on the Nasdaq

Sanjay Beri, chief executive officer and founder of Netskope Inc., listens during a Bloomberg West television interview in San Francisco, California.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Cloud security platform Netskope will go public on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “NTSK,” the company said in an initial public offering filing Friday.

The Santa Clara, California-based company said annual recurring revenue grew 33% to $707 million, while revenues jumped 31% to about $328 million in the first half of the year.

But Netskope isn’t profitable yet. The company recorded a $170 million net loss during the first half of the year. That narrowed from a $207 million loss a year ago.

Netskope joins an increasing number of technology companies adding momentum to the surge in IPO activity after high inflation and interest rates effectively killed the market.

So far this year, design software firm Figma more than tripled in its New York Stock Exchange debut, while crypto firm Circle soared 168% in its first trading day. CoreWeave has also popped since its IPO, while trading app eToro surged 29% in its May debut.

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Netskope’s offering also coincides with a busy period for cybersecurity deals.

The year’s two biggest technology deals include Alphabet’s $32 billion acquisition of Wiz and Palo Alto Networksambitious plan to buy Israeli identity security company CyberArk for $25 billion.

Founded in 2012, Netskope made a name for itself in its early years in the cloud access security broker space. The company lists Palo Alto Networks, Cisco, Zscaler, Broadcom and Fortinet as its major competitors.

Netskope’s biggest backers include Accel, Lightspeed Ventures and Iconiq, which recently benefited from Figma’s stellar debut.

Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan are leading the offering. Netskope listed 13 other Wall Street banks as underwriters.

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