By AI hype or mobile reality? | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
I love a circus, and the Arm IPO is kinda looking like a P.T. Barnum production. As our ringmaster, we have SoftBank, the current majority owner of Arm. On the high wire, with no net, we have AI. Riding an elephant, we have mobile. And doing a contortion act, we have US-China relations.
It’s been a slow time for IPOs, and the tech industry’s major silver lining is the AI boom. The bull case for Arm, the Cambridge, England-based company that designs chips, relies on its ability to move into the AI market. After all, in its current iteration, AI relies on massive data centers, stocked with state-of-the-art chips. But its most recent corporate filing raises some other concerns — and the question in my mind is what matters most to these…