MW Ambiq's stock soars after IPO. Here's where the company sees its place in the AI boom.

By Britney Nguyen

The market for edge AI devices is growing fast, and Ambiq's IPO will help it fund more products to meet demand there, executives say

Ambiq Micro Inc.'s stock is popping in its first trading day on the New York Stock Exchange.

Shares opened Wednesday afternoon at $38, well above their initial-public-offering price of $24. Ambiq's stock (AMBQ) was changing hands just below $43 at recent check, up 78% from their IPO price.

The company, which was founded in 2010, is focused on developing ultra-low-power chip solutions that can be used for edge artificial intelligence, or running AI models and algorithms on smaller, power-constrained devices such as smartwatches and headphones, without having to send the data to the cloud.

"AI is attempting to break out of the cloud," Ambiq founder and chief technology officer Scott Hanson told MarketWatch in an interview. "A lot of computation requires energy, so to move it out to battery-powered devices that are all around us, you've got to have a low-power solution."

See more: Ambiq will soon make its IPO debut. Here's what to know about the AI chip company.

Ambiq sees itself as "the enabler" of edge AI devices, the company's chief executive Fumihide Esaka told MarketWatch. These are part of a fast-growing market - one of the reasons why the company felt it was the right time to go public. With "exploding demand for edge AI, we wanted to make sure that we have enough products to enable a lot of edge AI devices," and have them readily available to the market, Esaka said.

The edge AI market is projected to be worth $13.9 billion this year, according to Gartner research data cited by Ambiq - a large share of which is made up by devices for smart homes and cities. By 2028, Gartner projects the market will reach $22.6 billion.

Ambiq has four focus markets, Hanson said: personal devices such as fitness trackers and smart rings, health and medical devices, industrial devices such as monitors for factory machines and smart home and smart building devices.

"There's a demand across all those markets for more intelligence," Hanson said. "We're really focused on markets, not that just want extra battery life, we want markets that care deeply about adding intelligence to their products, adding AI where there was none before, building bigger AI models, running those AI models faster."

Altogether, "it's a huge opportunity, and it's one where we have a very strong value proposition," Hanson added.

The company plans to use the $96 million it raised from the IPO to expand its engineering team to build more products faster and at the same time, Esaka said. The Austin-based company has teams across the world, including in Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, India and China.

Ambiq, which counts Arm Holdings Plc. as an investor, said in its IPO prospectus that its products, which include systems-on-chip (SoCs) and software solutions, are currently used in more than 270 million devices - many of which are incorporating AI features. The company said it shipped more than 42 million units last year, more than 40% of which are estimated to have been used for running AI algorithms.

"Over time, we expect to integrate our ultra-low-power technology into additional chip products that benefit from greater power efficiency, including high-performance compute applications such as AI data centers and automotive," Ambiq said in its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

-Britney Nguyen

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July 30, 2025 13:55 ET (17:55 GMT)

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