Intel Sells $147M Stake in Arm Amid Financial Struggles, Layoffs

Intel sold its 1.18 million shares in chip designer Arm as the company struggles to navigate financial struggles and layoffs. 

Intel’s latest 13F form, which companies use to report their securities holdings at the end of each quarter, shows it no longer holds any shares in the British semiconductor firm.

In the previous quarter, Intel held 1,176,470 shares of Arm Holdings valued at around $147 million.

The company has not publicly commented on the share sale and there’s been no word on who has bought the shares. Arm is still majority-owned by Japanese investment firm SoftBank.

For a time, Intel was competing with several Arm-based chips in the CPU market.

Intel and Arm later partnered to work on embedded systems as part of the Yocto Project, which offers tools and processes for developing Linux-based software optimized for embedded systems.

As recently as March, Intel announced it would be working with Arm to build low-power system-on-chips on its 18A process.

Intel’s parting of its Arm shares comes as the company looks to cut costs and raise cash to improve its increasingly worrisome position. 

The company’s share price is stuck below $20 as investors reacted negatively to its decision to lay off 15% of its workforce, around 17,000 jobs.  

Related:Intel Decision to Pass on OpenAI Deal Has Significant Financial Impact

Intel is also looking at voluntary redundancies. The company reportedly offered staff in Ireland with more than two years of service a redundancy package that includes five weeks' pay for each year of service, on top of the country's statutory redundancy rate of two weeks' pay for each year of service.

Intel is also facing multiple lawsuits over its infamously poor 13th and 14th-generation Raptor Lake CPUs, which routinely suffered from crashes resulting from excessive voltage damaging the hardware.

To top it off, news broke last week that Intel passed on investing in OpenAI for just $1 billion in 2017 because the company didn’t see generative AI as a near-term market win. Nvidia would instead supply the startup with its GPUs, dominating the hardware market.