Apple Creates New Contracts With Arm Until 2040

Apple's technology company has signed a new deal with Arm over chip technology that "acts until after 2040." This was revealed according to Arm's initial share offering document filed on Tuesday, September 5.

Arm announced its offering price on Tuesday for what is expected to be an initial US$52 billion (Rp789.3 trillion) share offering, which will be the largest offering this year in the US. Arm's owner, SoftBank Group, plans to offer 95.5 million American depositaries from the UK-based company for 47 to 51 US dollars per share. This was disclosed by Arm in filing documents.

Arm has intellectual property rights behind computing architecture for most smartphones in the world, licensed to Apple and many other companies. Apple uses Arm technology in chip design processes especially for its iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

These two companies have a long history. Apple was one of the early companies to partner to set up Arm's company in 1990, before the launch of the "Newton" portable computer in 1993, which uses Arm-based processor chips. Although Newton was less successful, Arm then dominated the mobile chip market because of its low power consumption, which helped the battery last longer.

Apple was among a large number of tech companies that invested USD 735 million on Tuesday in Arm's initial stock offering. Reuters last week was the first to confirm that Apple was among the strategic investors to agree to buy their shares.

The agreement announced this Tuesday was not disclosed in the previous IPO Arm filing document disclosed on August 21, indicating that the deal was signed between the date and September 5.

Arm declined to comment further apart from the contents of his filing, and Apple has not responded to requests for comment from the media.