The Taiwanese technology company Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the largest chip manufacturer in the world, announced that it will invest up to 100 million dollars (93 million euros at the exchange rate this Tuesday) in the IPO of the British company Arm on the stock market. from New York. In a brief statement posted on its website, TSMC confirms that its board of directors has approved the aforementioned investment days after revealing that it was considering it.
“Arm is an important part of our ecosystem, our technology and our customers’ ecosystem. We want it to be successful and healthy,” said TSMC president Mark Liu last week, quoted by Taiwanese press. The British microchip manufacturer, owned by the Japanese conglomerate Softbank, plans to set a price between $47 and $51 per share, a figure that would place its valuation at up to $52 billion.
TSMC is not the only globally known technology company that has expressed interest in participating in Arm’s IPO, something that companies such as Apple, Google, Nvidia and Intel have also done, according to the international economic press. Precisely, this last protagonist of another plan approved by the TSMC board, since the Taiwanese firm will acquire 10% of the Austrian company IMS Nanofabrication, owned by Intel since 2015, for about 432.8 million dollars.
Last June, Intel had already sold 20% of its stake in IMS to Bain Capital, a world leader in the production of multi-beam mask recorders, key components for global semiconductor manufacturing. The American technology company indicated in another statement that the sale will close in the fourth quarter, and noted that the operation places the valuation of IMS Nanofabrication at around $4.3 billion.
