SoftBank is in talks to bring in Amazon as an anchor investor in Arm’s upcoming initial public offering as part of a widening search to find customers willing to take a long-term stake in the UK-based chip designer.
The Japanese conglomerate, which acquired Arm in 2016, has over the past month intensified its efforts to secure cornerstone investors for the Cambridge-based company’s listing on New York’s Nasdaq exchange, according to two advisers familiar with the discussions.
Although the talks had originally focused on Nvidia, Intel and other chip manufacturers, two people close to the discussions said that they had since expanded to Google, Apple, Amazon and companies in other sectors heavily dependent on semiconductors. The same people said that these were likely to include the automotive and factory automation sectors.