So Arm went public last week and I've been turning it over in my head ever since, mostly because it's one of those companies that's touched almost every piece of tech I've owned since I was a teenager and I never once thought about who actually made the chip designs.
Quick recap for anyone who missed it: Arm Holdings, the British chip design company SoftBank has owned since 2016, priced its IPO at $51 a share on Wednesday and started trading on the Nasdaq Thursday under the ticker ARM. It popped hard out of the gate, jumping something like 25% on day one, which made it the biggest tech IPO of the year by a wide margin and honestly the biggest IPO period since Rivian back in 2021. SoftBank only sold off about 10% of the company, so Masayoshi Son is still sitting on the overwhelming majority of it. And the list of "cornerstone investors" who bought in ahead of the float reads like a who's who of everyone who has a reason to want Arm to stay independent and healthy: Nvidia, Apple, Google, Samsung, Intel, TSMC, AMD. When your competitors are also your investors that's usually a sign the underlying tech is load-bearing for the entire industry.
And that's really the thing that gets me. Arm doesn't make chips. It licenses the instruction set and the core designs that basically everyone else builds their actual silicon around. Every iPhone I've ever owned, going back to whichever one I had in 2011 when I started this blog, has had an Arm-based processor in it. The Raspberry Pi sitting on my desk right now, Arm. The M1 Mac I switched to a couple years ago and still haven't fully gotten used to (I miss my old Intel MacBook's ability to just run any random x86 tool without a second thought, fight me), also Arm underneath it. Android phones, Arm. Nintendo Switch, Arm. It's the most successful company most people have never heard of, and it took an IPO prospectus for me to actually sit down and think about that.
By Friday the stock had already given back a chunk of its opening pop, which is pretty normal for a hyped debut but is also just funny to watch happen in real time. Everyone wants to call the exact top and nobody ever manages it. I don't have any real money in this one and I'm not going to pretend I've got some hot take on whether ARM is a buy at whatever it's trading at by the time you read this. What I do find interesting is what this IPO says about the AI moment we're in. A huge amount of the pitch to investors was about AI workloads needing more efficient chip architecture, not just more powerful data center hardware. That's the story every company seems to be leaning on right now to justify a valuation, and Arm's case for it is actually more legitimate than most because efficiency has been the whole design philosophy since the company started in Cambridge in 1990.
Separate but sort of related, half my group chat has spent this week complaining about the MGM Resorts situation instead of getting excited about any of this, and fair enough honestly. If you haven't seen it, MGM's casinos and hotels have had slot machines, room keys, and reservation systems down for days after what sounds like a fairly simple social engineering attack, someone calling the IT help desk and talking their way into resetting credentials. No exotic zero-day, just a phone call that worked. A friend of mine had a trip to Vegas booked for this weekend and spent an hour on hold trying to confirm his reservation was still real. There's something almost insulting about a company that size getting taken down by a phone call instead of some elaborate exploit, and it's stuck with me more than the chip IPO honestly, because it's such a good reminder that the weakest link in most security setups is still a person having a bad day at a help desk.
Anyway. New phones are still trickling out to people who preordered, Arm stock is doing whatever Arm stock is doing, and I've got a Raspberry Pi project on my desk I keep promising myself I'll finish this month. We'll see.
Side note: I moved this blog's hosting over to Tricknowtech a couple months back after my old host kept choking during traffic spikes, and it's been nice not thinking about it since.