Arm’s Nasdaq debut on Thursday looks good for SoftBank, which just spun the company out after acquiring it in 2016. But it’s a head-scratcher for Wall Street.
The UK-based chip design company saw its stock jump 25% to $63.59 after its IPO, lifting the company’s fully diluted market cap to almost $68 billion.
That’s a wildly high number for a semiconductor company that generated $400 million in profit in the past four quarters. It results in a price-to-earnings ratio over that stretch of close to 170, a number that towers over even Nvidia’s P/E ratio.
Nvidia, which develops graphics processing units (GPUs) that are being used to run artificial intelligence workloads, trades for 109 times trailing earnings — and that’s after the stock price more than tripled this year, far outpacing any other member of the S&P 500.
In the rest of the chip sector, nothing even comes close. The Invesco PHLX Semiconductor ETF, which is designed to measure the performance of the 30 biggest U.S. chip companies, has a P/E ratio of about 21.
For investors, the critical difference between Nvidia and Arm is the growth rate. Nvidia just reported a doubling of revenue in the latest quarter and forecast expansion of 170% this period, as all the major cloud companies ramp up spending on AI chips. Arm’s revenue, by contrast, shrank slightly in the last quarter.
“There’s no way you can justify a P/E ratio of over 100 for a no-growth company,” said Jay Ritter, a finance professor at the University of Florida and a longtime expert in initial public offerings. The story has to be that “the company will be developing some new designs that restart growth and generate profits,” he said.
For now, there’s not a big open market for Arm’s stock. Of the roughly 1.03 billion shares outstanding immediately after the offering, SoftBank owns 90%. The Japanese tech conglomerate took Arm private in 2016 in a deal valued at $32 billion, and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son is aiming to pull in some liquidity after a very rough stretch of investments for his company.
Of the $4.9 billion worth of shares SoftBank sold, $735 million were purchased by a group of strategic investors including Apple, Google, Nvidia, Samsung and Intel. That leaves a small sliver of shares to be passed between institutional and retail investors and traders, though volume was high enough on Thursday that Arm was the fifth most actively traded stock on the Nasdaq, with 126.58 million shares trading hands.
To buy in at these levels as a long-term investor, the bet has to be on growth. In its prospectus, Arm made the case that its technology “will be central to this transition” to AI-based computing. Arm’s designs are currently in almost every smartphone on the market, as well as in electric cars and data centers.
“We’ve got significant growth in the cloud data center and in automotive,” Arm CEO Rene Haas told CNBC’s David Faber on Thursday. “And then with AI, AI runs on Arm. It’s hard to find an AI device today that isn’t Arm-based.”
Arm said in its IPO filing that it expects the addressable market for products with its designs to reach $246.6 billion by 2025, up from $202.5 billion last year. That’s only 6.8% annual growth, so Arm’s path to greater prosperity has to be through market share gains and improved economics.
“We expect that the cost and complexity of chip design will continue to increase, and that we will be able to contribute a greater proportion of the technology included in each chip, resulting in our royalties comprising a greater proportion of each chip’s total value,” the prospectus says.
Matt Oguz, founding partner of Venture Science, said his investment firm indicated interest in the IPO but didn’t receive an allocation. He said the bullish case for Arm is that it’s been able to maintain strong profit margins even with a slight slippage in revenue, and that it’s a “unique company” given the ubiquity of its technology in so many key products.
For fiscal 2023, Arm’s gross margin — the percentage of profit left after accounting for the costs of good sold — was 96%, because the company makes much of its money from royalties and isn’t delivering hardware. Nvidia’s gross margin in the latest quarter was 70%, and that’s after shooting up from under 44% a year earlier. Intel and AMD recorded gross margins of 36% and 46%, respectively.
Arm’s operating margin was 25% in the latest quarter, as it was able to stay profitable even as much of the chip industry lost money due in part to a post-Covid inventory glut.
“This is not a commodity company,” Oguz said. “When you combine all those things together, it’s not that easy to calculate a multiple” on future earnings, he said.
— CNBC’s Kif Leswing contributed to this report.
Correction: Arm’s revenue shrank in the latest quarter. An earlier version misstated the company name.
For a third time since taking office in January, President Donald Trumpplans toextend a deadline that would require China’s ByteDance to divest TikTok’s U.S. business.
“President Trump will sign an additional Executive Order this week to keep TikTok up and running,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “As he has said many times, President Trump does not want TikTok to go dark. This extension will last 90 days, which the Administration will spend working to ensure this deal is closed so that the American people can continue to use TikTok with the assurance that their data is safe and secure.”
ByteDance was nearing the deadline of June 19, to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations in order to satisfy a national security law that the Supreme Court upheld just a few days before Trump’s second presidential inauguration. Under the law, app store operators like Apple and Google and internet service providers would be penalized for supporting TikTok.
ByteDance originally faced a Jan. 19 deadline to comply with the national security law, but Trump signed an executive order when he first took office that pushed the deadline to April 5. Trump extended the deadline for the second time a day before that April mark.
Trump told NBC News in May that he would extend the TikTok deadline again if no deal was reached, and he reiterated his plans on Thursday.
Prior to Trump signing the first executive order, TikTok briefly went offline in the U.S. for a day, only to return after the president’s announcement. Apple and Google also removed TikTok from the Apple App Store and Google Play during TikTok’s initial U.S. shut down, but then reinstated the app to their respective app stores in February.
Multiple parties including Oracle, AppLovin, and Billionaire Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty consortium have expressed interest in buying TikTok’s U.S. operations. It’s unclear whether the Chinese government would approve a deal.
— CNBC’s Kevin Breuninger contributed to this report
Amazon Web Services is set to announce an update to its Graviton4 chip that includes 600 gigabytes per second of network bandwidth, what the company calls the highest offering in the public cloud.
Ali Saidi, a distinguished engineer at AWS, likened the speed to a machine reading 100 music CDs a second.
Graviton4, a central processing unit, or CPU, is one of many chip products that come from Amazon’s Annapurna Labs in Austin, Texas. The chip is a win for the company’s custom strategy and putting it up against traditional semiconductor players like Intel and AMD.
At AWS’s re:Invent 2024 conference last December, the company announced Project Rainier – an AI supercomputer built for startup Anthropic. AWS has put $8 billion into backing Anthropic.
AWS Senior Director for Customer and Project Engineering Gadi Hutt said Amazon is looking to reduce AI training costs and provide an alternative to Nvidia’s expensive graphics processing units, or GPUs.
Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4 AI model is trained on Trainium2 GPUs, according to AWS, and Project Rainier is powered by over half a million of the chips – an order that would have traditionally gone to Nvidia.
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Hutt said that while Nvidia’s Blackwell is a higher-performing chip than Trainium2, the AWS chip offers better cost performance.
“Trainium3 is coming up this year, and it’s doubling the performance of Trainium2, and it’s going to save energy by an additional 50%,” he said.
The demand for these chips is already outpacing supply, according to Rami Sinno, director of engineering at AWS’ Annapurna Labs.
“Our supply is very, very large, but every single service that we build has a customer attached to it,” he said.
With Graviton4’s upgrade on the horizon and Project Rainier’s Trainium chips, Amazon is demonstrating its broader ambition to control the entire AI infrastructure stack, from networking to training to inference.
And as more major AI models like Claude 4 prove they can train successfully on non-Nvidia hardware, the question isn’t whether AWS can compete with the chip giant — it’s how much market share it can take.
The release schedule for the Graviton4 update will be provided by the end of June, according to an AWS spokesperson.
The U.S. banking giant told CNBC on Tuesday that it’s planning to launch a so-called deposit token on Coinbase’s public blockchain Base, which is built on top of the Ethereum network. Each deposit token is meant to serve as a digital representation of a commercial bank deposit.
JPMD will offer clients round-the-clock settlement as well as the ability to pay interest to holders. It is a so-called “permissioned token,” meaning it is only available to JPMorgan’s institutional clients — unlike many stablecoins, which are publicly available.
“We see institutions using JPMD for onchain digital asset settlement solutions as well as for making cross-border business-to-business transactions,” Naveen Mallela, global co-head of Kinexys, J.P. Morgan’s blockchain unit, told CNBC Tuesday.
“Given the fact that deposit tokens would eventually be interest bearing as well, this would provide better fungibility with existing deposit products that institutions currently use,” he added.
Deposit token vs. stablecoin
JPMorgan said the benefit of launching a deposit token over a stablecoin is that it gives institutional clients a way to move money around faster and easier while still having a close connection with traditional banking systems.
A stablecoin is a type of digital token that’s designed to be pegged 1:1 to the value of a fiat currency at all times. The most popular stablecoins are Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC. The entire stablecoin market is worth approximately $262 billion, according to data from CoinGecko.
In the U.S., stablecoins remain broadly unregulated — although this is likely to change soon. The Senate is set to vote Tuesday on the GENIUS Act, legislation that would introduce formal regulation for such tokens.
Elsewhere, the European Union regulates stablecoins under its Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, or MiCA, while the U.K. has also laid out plans to regulate the crypto industry. Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority is currently consulting on proposals to require stablecoin issuers to ensure their tokens maintain their value against a given asset.
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JPMorgan’s digital asset chief told CNBC that the bank chose Coinbase as its blockchain partner since the crypto exchange is already a long-standing client and a leader in the crypto space.
JPMD has had “preliminary interest from large institutional players who want more native onchain cash solutions from pre-eminent and reputed financial institutions,” Mallela added.
Speculation had been building around JPMorgan’s new crypto offering after a trademark application filed by the bank for “JPMD” was made public Monday.
The trademark outlined a broad range of crypto services under the JPMD name, including trading, exchange, transfer and payment services for digital assets.
Various crypto media outlets had speculated whether the bank was about to launch its own stablecoin. However, JPMorgan says that, while its token may share some similarities with a stablecoin, it’s ultimately a different kind of product.