STORY CONTINUES BELOW THESE SALTWIRE VIDEOSBy Anton Bridge
Arm"is at the centre of a group of AI-related companies to generate synergies" and"85% of SoftBank Group assets are AI-related companies overseas," he told investors in June. That's the figure SoftBank valued Arm at with the purchase of a 25% holding - the only part it did not directly own - from its Vision Fund unit, sources said on Friday.When SoftBank acquired the company in 2016, he said the Internet of Things would be the"greatest paradigm shift in the history of humankind," and Arm-designed chips would power every object newly connected to the internet. The shift has yet to materialise and IoT makes up a fraction of Arm's revenues.
To some extent, Arm can ride on Nvidia's coattails as Nvidia's chips must be coupled with energy-efficient central processing units - Arm's speciality. Arm customers are also making inroads in AI. Qualcomm and Apple have designed portions of chips geared toward AI processing and cloud computing companies like Amazon and Alphabet's Google have built AI-focused chips that don't use Arm technology.