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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.

Arm opens at $56.10 per share in market debut

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.

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AI chipmaker Cerebras withdraws IPO

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AI chipmaker Cerebras withdraws IPO

AI chipmaker Cerebras pulls IPO after raising $1 billion

Artificial intelligence chipmaker Cerebras Systems said on Friday that it’s withdrawing plans for an IPO, days after announcing that it raised over $1 billion in a fundraising round.

In a filing with the SEC, Cerebras said it does not intend to conduct a proposed offering “at this time,” but didn’t provide a reason. A spokesperson told CNBC on Friday that the company still hopes to go public as soon as possible.

Cerebras filed for an IPO just over a year ago, as it was ramping up to take on Nvidia in an effort to create processors for running generative AI models. The filing revealed a heavy reliance on a single customer in the United Arab Emirates, Microsoft-backed G42, which is also a Cerebras investor.

In its prospectus, Cerebras said it had given voluntary notice to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States about selling shares to G42. In March, the company announced that the committee had provided clearance.

Since its initial filing to go public on the Nasdaq, Cerebras has shifted its focus away from selling systems and more toward providing a cloud service for accepting incoming queries to models that use its chips underneath.

The announced withdrawal comes three days into a U.S. government shutdown that’s left agencies like the SEC operating with a small staff. In a plan for a shutdown published in August, the SEC said its electronic system EDGAR “is operated pursuant to a contract and thus will remain fully functional as long as funding for the contractor remains available through permitted means.”

On Tuesday, Cerebras said it had raised $1.1 billion at a valuation of $8.1 billion in a private funding round. At the time, CEO Andrew Feldman said that the company still wanted to go public, rather than continue to raise venture capital.

“I don’t think this is an indication of a preference for one or the other,” he told CNBC in an interview. “I think we have tremendous opportunities in front of us, and I think it’s good practice, when you have enormous opportunities, not to let them fall by the wayside for lack of capital.”

Feldman thought the original prospectus from last year was out of date, especially considering developments in AI, the spokesperson said on Friday.

Well heeled technology companies have been quickly signing up for additional infrastructure to handle demand. On Tuesday CoreWeave, which rents out Nvidia chips through a cloud service, said it had signed a $14.2 billion agreement with Meta. ChatGPT operator OpenAI said last week that it had committed to spending $300 billion on cloud services from Oracle.

The government shutdown did not factor into Cerebras’ decision, the spokesperson said.

WATCH: Interview with Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman

Cerebras CEO: Here's why our chips are a more efficient alternative to Nvidia

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Amazon shutters 4 Fresh stores in Southern California as grocery strategy keeps shifting

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Amazon shutters 4 Fresh stores in Southern California as grocery strategy keeps shifting

An employee arranges a salad dressing display at an Amazon Fresh grocery store on December 12, 2024 in Federal Way, Washington.

David Ryder | Getty Images

Amazon is closing four more Fresh supermarkets in Southern California as the e-commerce giant continues to focus its grocery strategy around Whole Foods and delivery.

The closures will take place in the coming weeks, Amazon confirmed to CNBC. They follow the shuttering of four other U.S. locations in recent months, in Washington, Virginia, New York and a Los Angeles suburb.

“Certain locations work better than others, and after an assessment, we’ve made the decision to close these Amazon Fresh locations,” Amazon spokesperson Griffin Buch said in a statement. “We’re working closely with affected employees to help them find new roles within Amazon wherever possible.”

At one Fresh supermarket in La Verne, California, employees were told to gather for an all-hands meeting on Wednesday, according to an internal message viewed by CNBC. They learned at the meeting that the store would close in mid-November, and that employees would receive a severance package, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the details were confidential.

The other three stores that are closing are in cities of Mission Viejo, La Habra and Whittier.

Last week, Amazon said it intends to close 14 Fresh grocery stores in the U.K. and convert its five other locations there into Whole Foods markets.

Amazon said it regularly evaluates its store portfolio, which can lead to opening, reopening, relocating or closing certain locations. In the U.S., the company has more than 60 remaining Fresh stores. Last year, the company removed its “Just Walk Out” cashierless technology from the stores. It’s also been culling its footprint of Go cashierless convenience stores.

Amazon has been determined to become a major grocery player for nearly two decades. The company launched Amazon Fresh in 2007, then a pilot project for fresh food delivery, before acquiring upscale chain Whole Foods for $13.7 billion in 2017, its biggest purchase on record.

Amazon debuted its Fresh grocery chain in 2020, with an eye toward mass-market shoppers. The rollout has been turbulent since its early days.

The company opened a flurry of Fresh locations by 2022, but the expansion plans ran into CEO Andy Jassy’s widespread cost-cutting efforts as the company reckoned with the impact of rising interest rates and soaring inflation. In 2023, Amazon announced it would shut some Fresh stores and halt further openings temporarily as it evaluated how to make the chain stand out for shoppers.

While it’s closing Fresh stores, Amazon continues to “innovate and invest in making grocery shopping easier, faster, and more affordable,” Buch said. The company still maintains 500 Whole Foods locations and has opened mini “daily shop” Whole Foods stores in New York City.

On Wednesday, Amazon also launched a new “price-conscious” grocery brand that will be offered online and in its physical stores. And last month, Amazon expanded same-day delivery of fresh foods to more pockets of the U.S.

Jassy and other company executives have touted the success of sales of “everyday essentials” within its online grocery business, which refers to items such as canned goods, paper towels, dish soap and snacks. Jassy told investors at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in May that he remains “bullish” on grocery, calling it a “significant business” for Amazon.

WATCH: Amazon grocery could be a trojan horse to more revenue

Amazon's grocery could be a trojan horse to move revenue higher, says Evercore ISI's Mark Mahaney

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Quantum stocks Rigetti Computing and D-Wave surged double-digits this week. Here’s what’s driving the big move

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Quantum stocks Rigetti Computing and D-Wave surged double-digits this week. Here's what's driving the big move

Inside Google’s quantum computing lab in Santa Barbara, California.

CNBC

Quantum computing stocks are wrapping up a big week of double-digit gains.

Shares of Rigetti Computing, D-Wave Quantum and Quantum Computing have surged more than 20%. Rigetti and D-Wave Quantum have more than doubled and tripled, respectively, since the start of the year. Arqit Quantum skyrocketed more than 32% this week.

The jump in shares followed a wave of positive news in the quantum space.

Rigetti said it had purchase orders totalling $5.7 million for two of its 9-qubit Novera quantum computing systems. The owner of drugmaker Novo Nordisk and the Danish government also invested 300 million euros in a quantum venture fund.

In a blog post earlier this week, Nvidia also highlighted accelerated computing, which it argues can make “quantum computing breakthroughs of today and tomorrow possible.”

Investors have piled into quantum computing technology this year, as tech giants Microsoft, Nvidia and Amazon have embraced the technology with a wave of new chip announcements, multi-million dollar investments and research plans.

Read more CNBC tech news

Quantum computing is the most radical technology in history: Bank of America's Haim Israel

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