New Delhi, March 25 -- US-listed shares of Arm Holdings, the chip design firm owned by SoftBank, witnessed strong buying interest from the opening bell on Wall Street, surging 19% to hit a 3-month high of $157.80 apiece on the Nasdaq as investors cheered the company's announcement that it will sell its own chips for the first time.

Arm on Tuesday unveiled its first-ever data centre CPU, which has already entered the customer sampling stage, with production slated for later this year. The move is significant as it puts Arm in direct competition with some of its key customers, including Nvidia, Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft.

Meta, OpenAI, and smaller players such as Cloudflare have pledged to be among the first to deploy the chip, dubbe...