Arm CEO Rene Haas and executives cheer, as Softbank’s Arm, chip design firm, holds an initial public offering (IPO) at Nasdaq Market site in New York, U.S., September 14, 2023.
Brendan Mcdermid | Reuters
Arm Holdings, the chip design company controlled by SoftBank, jumped nearly 20% during intraday trading on Thursday after selling shares at $51 a piece in its IPO.
At the open, Arm was valued at almost $60 billion. The company, trading under ticker symbol “ARM,” sold around 95.5 million shares. SoftBank, which took the company private in 2016, controls around 90% of shares outstanding.
On Wednesday, Arm priced shares at the upper end of its expected range. On Thursday, the stock first traded at $56.10.
It’s a hefty premium for the British chip company. At a $60 billion valuation, Arm’s price-to-earnings multiple would be over 110 based on the most recent fiscal year profit. That’s comparable to Nvidia’s valuation, which trades at 108 times earnings, but without Nvidia’s 170% growth forecast for the current quarter.
Arm CFO Jason Child told CNBC in an interview that the company is focusing on royalty growth and providing products to its customers that cost and do more.
Many of Arm’s royalties come from products released decades ago. About half of the company’s royalty revenue, which totaled $1.68 billion in 2022, comes from products released between 1990 and 2012.
“As a CFO, it’s one of the better business models I’ve seen. I joke sometimes that those older products are like the Beatles catalog, they just keep delivering royalties. Some of those products are three decades old,” Child said.
In a presentation to investors, Arm said it expects the total market for its chip designs to be worth about $250 billion by 2025, including growth in chip designs for data centers and cars. Arm’s revenue in its fiscal year that ended in March slipped less than 1% from the prior year to $2.68 billion.
Arm’s architecture is used in nearly every smartphone chip, and outlines how a central processor works at its most basic level, such as doing arithmetic or accessing computer memory.
Child said that the company sold $735 million in shares to a group of strategic investors comprised of Apple, Google, Nvidia, Samsung, AMD, Intel, Cadence, Synopsis, Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. It’s a testament to Arm’s influence among chip companies, which rely on Arm’s technology to design and build their own chips.
“There was there was interest to buy more than what was indicated, but we wanted to make sure we had a diverse set of shareholders,” Child said.
In an interview with CNBC on Thursday, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son emphasized how Arm technology is used in artificial intelligence chips, as he seeks to tie the firm to the recent boom in AI and machine learning. He also said he wanted to keep the company’s remaining Arm stake as long as possible.
The debut could kick open the market for technology IPOs, which have been paused for nearly two years. It’s the biggest technology offering of 2023.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman walks on the day of a meeting of the White House Task Force on Artificial Intelligence (AI) Education in the East Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., September 4, 2025.
Brian Snyder | Reuters
OpenAI on Tuesday announced it will launch a dedicated ChatGPT experience with parental controls for users under 18 years old as the artificial intelligence company works to enhance safety protections for teenagers.
When OpenAI identifies that a user is a minor, they will automatically be directed to an age-appropriate ChatGPT experience that blocks graphic and sexual content and can involve law enforcement in rare cases of acute distress, the company said.
OpenAI is also developing a technology to better predict a user’s age, but ChatGPT will default to the under-18 experience if there is uncertainty or incomplete information.
The startup’s safety updates come after the Federal Trade Commission recently launched an inquiry into several tech companies, including OpenAI, over how AI chatbots like ChatGPT potentially negatively affect children and teenagers.
The agency said it wants to understand what steps these companies have taken to “evaluate the safety of these chatbots when acting as companions,” according to a release.
OpenAI also shared how ChatGPT will handle “sensitive situations” last month after a lawsuit from a family blamed the chatbot for their teenage son’s death by suicide.
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“We prioritize safety ahead of privacy and freedom for teens; this is a new and powerful technology, and we believe minors need significant protection,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in a blog post on Tuesday.
In August, OpenAI said it would release parental controls to help them understand and shape how their teens are using ChatGPT. OpenAI shared more details about those parental controls on Tuesday, and it said they will be available at the end of the month.
The company’s upcoming controls will allow parents to link their ChatGPT account with their teen’s via email, set blackout hours for when their teen can’t use the chatbot, manage which features to disable, guide how the chatbot responds and receive notifications if the teen is in acute distress.
ChatGPT is intended for users who are ages 13 and up, OpenAI said.
“These are difficult decisions, but after talking with experts, this is what we think is best and want to be transparent in our intentions,” Altman wrote.
If you are having suicidal thoughts or are in distress, contact the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 for support and assistance from a trained counselor
A Youtube podcast microphone is seen at the Variety Podcasting Brunch Presented By YouTube at Austin Proper Hotel in Austin, Texas, on March 8, 2025.
Mat Hayward | Variety | Getty Images
YouTube said on Tuesday it has paid out over $100 billion to creators, artists and media companies since 2021.
The surge has been fueled in part by growing viewership on connected TVs. The number of channels making more than $100,000 from TV screens jumped 45% year over year, the company said.
YouTube Chief Product Officer Johanna Voolich praised the power of creators to “shape culture and entertainment in ways we never thought possible” in a release announcing the benchmark and a series of other new features.
The milestone comes as the Google-owned platform marks its 20th year and pushes to cement itself as one of the world’s most lucrative media businesses.
YouTube unveiled the updated payout figure and a slate of new creator tools at its annual Made on YouTube event in New York City.
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The company announced new artificial intelligence tools for YouTube Shorts, its short-form vertical video product. Creators will be able to turn raw footage into edited clips with AI and can add music, transitions and voiceover.
New features also include the ability to turn dialogue from eligible videos into a song to be used in the Short.
Google’s latest AI video generator, Veo 3, will also be integrated into Shorts, YouTube said.
Google uses a subset of YouTube videos to train Veo 3, to the surprise of many YouTube creators, CNBC reported in June.
YouTube turned 20 years old in April and announced it hosted over 20 billion videos on the platform, including music, Shorts, podcasts and more.
Last year, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan said the company had paid $70 billion to creators between 2021 and 2024.
The framework agreement for the social media platform TikTok will include new investors as well as existing investors in the platform’s Chinese parent company ByteDance, sources told CNBC’s David Faber.
The deal is expected to close in the next 30 to 45 days, according to the sources, who asked not to be named because the details of the negotiations are confidential. As part of the agreement, Oracle will keep its cloud deal with the platform, the people said.
“Where this thing is capitalized and how large it is remains to be seen,” Faber said during CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Tuesday. “‘I’m hearing it’s actually going to be relatively small in terms of the actual size of the checks that are written for the entity itself, and it will not be something that is going to go public at some point.”
The White House, TikTok and Oracle did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
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TikTok’s future in the U.S. has been uncertain since 2024, when Congress passed a bill that would ban the platform unless its Chinese owner, ByteDance, divested from it. Lawmakers had grown concerned that the Chinese government could access sensitive data from American users or manipulate content on the platform.
Deal talks have dragged, with President Donald Trumpextending the deadline three times since taking office in January.
The new details about the deal come after U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday that the U.S. and China have reached a “framework” deal for TikTok.
Bessent said Tuesday that commercial terms had been in place since March or April, but the Chinese put it on hold after Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff blitz.
Oracle has been floated as a potential investor or buyer of TikTok for months.
Reuters reported in January that the White House picked Oracle to handle TikTok’s data collection and software updates as part of a deal.
Trump has previously said he’d be open to Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison buying TikTok in the U.S.