Intel has sold its stock in chip design firm Arm - probably netting around $147 million and a tidy profit, given the price of Arm scrip has risen 96 percent in the ten months since it returned to public trading.

Chipzilla is not saying why it offloaded its shares. The only public notice of the sale is an updated version of its equity holdings disclosure filed on Tuesday [PDF] in which 1,176,470 shares in ARM Holdings Plc - evident in the November 2023 version of the same document - have been omitted.

The shares were acquired amid suggestions that Apple, Samsung, and Chipzilla would each buy a chunk of Arm to demonstrate their commitment to the chip design biz. Apple and Samsung use Arm's tech in their homebrew silicon, and Intel's Foundry Services business will happily bake Arm cores for its clients.

Taking a stake in Arm - which also meant acquiring some voting rights - showed that the three giants have skin in the game and an active interest in the Brit chip designer's success.

But Intel's out of the game - at least for now.

Potentially it's just trying to raise some cash, as it tries to recover from losses that have seen it shed thousands of staff, deals with the fallout of faulty Raptor Lake products, and works to deliver a new wave of manufacturing processes and products hoping make its tech more attractive to buyers of PCs, servers, and AI infrastructure.

Intel trails badly in the latter field - lacking a GPU to match those from AMD or Nvidia. In the PC space, upstart challenger Qualcomm is Microsoft's poster child for Copilot+ PCs. Even server buyers - a market Intel has dominated with its Xeon range - are increasingly turning to AMD. And more challengers are emerging as hyperscale clouds tout their own Arm-powered processors, and the likes of Ampere promise processors with core counts that greatly exceed those from any x86 purveyor.

Shareholdings still in Intel's portfolio include air taxi explorer Joby Aviation, AI networking outfit Astera Labs, smart medicine concern Senti Biosciences, and open source database dev MariaDB.

Why hang onto scrip from a biz that sells a MySQL fork? Perhaps because there's not much money to be made by selling - MariaDB's shares go for around 55 cents apiece. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/08/14/intel_sells_arm_shares/