Arm chip company Ampere has confidentially filed for an initial public offering (IPO) in the United States.

Ampere designs server chips based on the Arm architecture, primarily developing high core count chips for high-end workloads.

Founded in 2018 by former Intel president Renée James, Ampere is now planning to go public via an IPO, having filed a confidential prospectus with the SEC.

This allows it to list without making the standard significant disclosures about its operations and financial performance. While the step marks the beginning of a journey to go public, companies can still back out, or be acquired.

It is not known what Ampere plans to value the company as.

The company's Altra and Altra Max CPUs are based on the standard Arm Neoverse N1 architecture, but its upcoming Siryn CPU uses custom Ampere Cores. The wider architecture will still be licensed from Arm, but the company will not license Neoverse cores.

The shift to in-house design aims to give the company more control over its chip design, and help it tailor the products to the needs of hyperscalers, it said last year.

Hyperscalers and large data center operators are already interested in the company's products. It claims Altra customers include Microsoft, Tencent, TikTok's ByteDance, Scaleway, Equinix, CloudFlare, and uCloud.

But the largest backer of Ampere appears to be Oracle, which has invested $426 million in the business and embraced its products most publicly. Oracle’s latest quarterly earnings report suggests that it has between a 20 and 50 percent stake in the business.

Last October, Bloomberg reported that Oracle was in talks with SoftBank for a stake that would have valued Ampere at about $8 billion.