KUALA LUMPUR: SkyeChip Bhd, which debuted on the Main Market of Bursa Malaysia yesterday and closed at about 2.5 times its initial public offering (IPO) price, aims to expand from semiconductor intellectual property (IP) design into artificial intelligence (AI)-focused silicon products and compute solutions.
Chief executive officer Datuk Fong Swee Kiang said the company, which started as a silicon IP provider, is now targeting more complete AI silicon solutions, including custom application-specific integrated circuits (Asics), AI hardware accelerators and advanced semiconductor packaging technologies.
“We started as a silicon IP company. But we do have a goal from silicon IP to expand it to silicon IP and silicon products,” Fong, who holds a 24% stake in the company post-IPO, told a press conference in conjunction with its listing ceremony.
“As a silicon IP company, we are more like supplying into integrated circuit (IC) peers.
“When we go into silicon products, we are becoming a solution to the platform,” he added.
Rather than competing directly with global semiconductor giants such as Nvidia, Intel and AMD in mainstream central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) markets, Fong said SkyeChip is focusing on AI accelerators, custom computing solutions, and input/output die technologies for advanced 2.5-dimensional and three-dimensional semiconductor packaging.
The company also sees opportunities from Arm Holdings plc’s compute subsystem (CSS), which could allow it to participate in server-class CPU developments tied to AI infrastructure.
In March 2025, Malaysia announced a 10-year partnership worth US$250mil with Arm to acquire various IP licences, including seven Arm CSS and 25 Arm Flexible Access tokens, while training 10,000 engineers.
SkyeChip is among a handful of Malaysian companies granted conditional access to Arm’s design platforms under the initiative.
Last month, the company received conditional approvals for one CSS platform and one flexible access platform.
“But for CSS, since it’s a very huge undertaking, we are putting a lot more due diligence inside our own operations to make sure that when we embark on a CSS journey, we see success in front of us,” Fong said.
When asked whether the company had secured hyperscaler or data centre partners for its Arm-based server CPU ambitions, he said discussions are ongoing.
“But we do believe that it is important that when we design a chip of this scale of investment, we need to have a system partner to make sure that our investment will be backed with a customer,” Fong further noted.
Fong said the company aims to differentiate itself through strong semiconductor IP and its ability to deliver more efficient silicon solutions.
“But at the same time, we are also going to come up with silicon products that make the system more efficient in terms of performance, more efficient in terms of power,” he said.
Separately, Bloomberg earlier this week reported that the US Federal Trade Commission has launched an antitrust investigation into Arm Holdings over its semiconductor licensing practices, specifically probing whether the company is illegally monopolising parts of the chip market as it expands into making its own in-house processors.
When asked about the matter, Fong declined to comment on other companies’ affairs.
SkyeChip raised RM352mil from its IPO exercise involving the issuance of 400 million new shares, representing 22.3% of its enlarged issued share capital of about 1.8 billion shares.
The stock opened at RM3.50, nearly four times its IPO price of 88 sen, yesterday.
The shares traded as high as RM3.80 before easing to close at RM2.21, valuing the company at about 67 times forward earnings based on Bloomberg consensus financial year 2027 earnings per share estimates of 3.3 sen.
