ARM Market Value First Broke 300 Billion USD during Trading, Son Masayoshi and SoftBank 'Earned' 550%
Driven by the explosive growth in global AI computing power demand, the share price of chip architecture design giant ARM reached an all-time high during Thursday's U.S. stock trading, touching 282.80 USD at one point, with a gain of over 10%, and the market capitalization surpassed 300 billion USD for the first time.
This investment has become the "super return" of SoftBank Group and its founder, Masayoshi Son's career. SoftBank currently holds about 87% of ARM's shares with a total book cost of around 40 billion USD. Calculated with ARM's market value of 300.9 billion USD during the trading, this investment has a paper profit of over 220 billion USD, corresponding to a return rate of about 550%.
In 2016, Masayoshi Son acquired all of ARM's shares for 32 billion USD in cash, a 43% premium to its market value at that time. He said during the acquisition:
This is one of the most important acquisitions in our history, and I anticipate that ARM will become a key pillar of SoftBank's growth strategy in the future.
After the acquisition, SoftBank planned to sell ARM at one point but was unsuccessful, and subsequently promoted its independent listing. In September 2023, ARM went public on the NASDAQ, and SoftBank still retained about 90% of the shares after the IPO, maintaining absolute control.
The AI cycle has completely reshaped the valuation logic of this asset. With the global AI boom, ARM architecture has been widely used in AI servers and edge AI chips, and has become an indispensable core underlying architecture for AI hardware expansion.
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