Japanese conglomerate Softbank (SFTBY  ) announced plans to take Arm Ltd public last Monday, just hours after the company scuttled plans to sell Arm to Nvidia (NVDA  ) in the face of significant industry regulatory opposition.

The tie-up would've been the largest such deal in the industry's history and would have netted SoftBank $80 billion owing to a rise in Nvidia's share price, said company CEO Masayoshi Son at the company's Tokyo presentation.

However, both sides canceled the deal owing to "significant regulatory challenges," said SoftBank in a statement.

Arm Ltd's neutrality is pivotal to the likes of Samsung, Apple, and a host of other interests spread out across the industry. As such, the deal sparked a significant degree of regulatory attention, causing the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to sue to block the transaction in December.

"We saw strong opposition because Arm is one of the most important and essential companies that most companies in the IT industry or in Silicon Valley rely on, either directly or indirectly," Son noted at his Tokyo presser.

Yet Son also stressed that now was a "golden period" as demand for Arm's chip designs, used in everything from Amazon (AMZN  ) servers to iPhones (AAPL  ), accelerates.

The company's chip designs feature in 95% of the world's smartphones and its estimated 70% of the world's population uses a device featuring an Arm licensed component every day.

Arm's designs are noted for their energy efficiency, making them optimal for mobile devices. Meanwhile, the likes of Samsung and Apple rely on Arm's instruction set to get chips to talk to the software on their devices, making efforts to switch to a competitor's code would be next to impossible.

Arm's role as the "Switzerland," of the tech industry was central to the FTC's claim that the merger with Nvidia would hobble innovation in the semiconductor space.

Softbank said it hopes to bring the pivotal chip designer public by the end of the fiscal year ending in March 2023. Arm will likely list on the tech-heavy Nasdaq owing to its relationship to many of the companies listed there, said Son.

The offering comes at a time of turmoil for Softbank. Shares in the firm slid 33% in 2021 and are down 2% so far this year, the company's worst performance since 2006.

Meanwhile, Softbank's public holdings continues to decline in values as tightening Fed policies have caused shares in tech to tumble. According to the company's preferred metric, the net value of Softbank's assets fell to 168 billion in December versus $187 billion in October.

Son said the biggest hit to the company's assets during that time came from a decline in shares of Alibaba (BABA  ). The Chinese e-retailer once accounted for a majority of the company's holdings but now accounts for less than a quarter.

Despite the ongoing rout in tech stocks, an Arm IPO could present a critical opportunity for Softbank to shore up its war chest Fumio Matsumoto, chief strategist at Okasan Securities, told the Wall Street Journal.

"Because technology share prices have gone through a sharp correction over the past year, we are seeing a good cycle to consider preparing" for new investments," he said.