Arm Ltd. hopes to achieve a valuation of at least $60 billion in its upcoming initial public offering, according to a new report.

Reports emerged earlier this year that Arm was targeting a valuation of between $30 billion to $70 billion for the stock sale. Today, Bloomberg cited sources as saying that the company is now seeking a range of $60 billion to $70 billion. It’s believed Arm may attempt to secure a valuation as high as $80 billion, but its chances of achieving that goal are described as “uncertain.”

U.K.-based Arm develops chip blueprints that semiconductor companies use as the basis of their products. Its technology can be found in 99% of the world’s high-end smartphones, as well as billions of connected devices ranging from smart home gadgets to industrial sensors.

In recent years, Arm silicon has also started finding its way into hyperscale data centers. All three major cloud providers offer compute instances powered by the chip designer’s technology. Amazon Web Services Inc. has developed a custom Arm-based processor series called AWS Graviton, while Google LLC and Microsoft Corp. source their Arm-based silicon from Ampere Computing LLC.

The chip designer’s silicon is popular partly because of its power efficiency. Minimizing power usage is an equally important priority for data center operators and smartphone makers keen to extend their devices’ battery life. 

Arm processors’ efficiency partly stems from the fact that they’re based on a chip architecture called RISC. RISC chips’ main feature is that their instruction set, or the machine language in which they express computations, is relatively simple. That simplicity reduces the amount of power necessary to carry out computing instructions and thereby increases efficiency. 

Arm launched in 1983 as a joint venture between Apple Inc. and two other, since-defunct players in the early personal computer market. The chip designer listed its shares on the London Stock Exchange five years later. Arm operated as a publicly traded company for more than three decades until 2016, when it was taken private by SoftBank Group Corp.

SoftBank stands to realize a significant return on its investment through the chip designer’s upcoming IPO. It paid $32 billion to take Arm private in 2016, or about half the valuation the IPO could fetch on the low end of the reported target range.

The roadshow for the public offering is set to begin in the first week of September, Bloomberg reported today. A roadshow is a marketing push through which a soon-to-be-public company and its underwriters promote its IPO to potential investors. According to today’s report, pricing for the IPO will be set the following week and the stock sale could be held as early as the second half of September.

Earlier reports suggest that Arm is seeking to add Intel Corp. and Nvidia Corp. as anchor investors in the IPO. The chip designer is an important partner of both companies. Nvidia uses Arm technology in some of its data center products, while Intel plans to manufacture Arm-based processors for customers of its nascent chip foundry business.

It’s believed Arm could sell as much as $10 billion worth of shares through the upcoming IPO. That would make the stock listing one of the largest in the history of the tech industry and the biggest this year. 

Image: Arm