With a price of $51 per share, Arm’s IPO is the biggest of the year on the NASDAQ after snubbing the London Stock Exchange for its return to the stock market.

The Cambridge-based chip designer was originally publicly listed on both the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and the Nasdaq since its founding in 1998, but then went private when it was bought by the Japanese firm Softbank in 2016.

Now, the company has said it already sold 95.5 million shares, raising $4.87bn in total thus far.

Softbank’s move to list Arm publicly comes after a failed attempt to sell Arm to competing chip maker Nvidia, which was blocked due to regulatory pressures from the UK, US, EU, and China.

The Japanese firm has touted the expected success of Arm, saying that their microchip technology will be central to the AI boom.

Softbank recently moved to purchase the remaining quarter of Arm they did not outright own for $64bn, much higher than their original purchase of the firm back in $37bn, from Saudi-based Vision Fund.

Known as the “crown jewel” of the UK, Arm’s decision to list in the US rather than London was a blow to the UK, as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was unsuccessful in his talks with the company bidding them to list on the LSE.

Arm touts microchip designs that are energy-efficient and low cost, and provide the central processing units (CPUs) for semiconductor companies across the globe. Arm sells its products to a wide range of tech giants including Apple, Mercedes-Benz, and Qualcomm.

While most of its designs are typically manufactured by other companies, Arm announced earlier this year that it will begin developing its own semiconductor with its manufacturing partners.

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As far as the race to developing AI-capable chips, Arm is directly competing with Nvidia, which is currently powering the data centres behind ChatGPT.

However, since Arm specialises in smaller microchips typically used in smartphones, there are many available AI avenues to take advantage of.