After a couple of weeks of rumours, the abandonment of Nvidia’s attempt to buy ARM is already a fact. The news has been confirmed jointly by ARM’s parent company, SoftBank, and Nvidia, in a statement in which they allude to the “regulatory problems” that have hindered the operation as the reason for the end of the agreement that it had reached with Nvidia. . From Muycomputer they also remember that the agreement did not like a hair to several of ARM’s main clients, who opposed its sale. Thus, Nvidia will no longer invest 66,000 million dollars in the operation.
As expected, the breakdown of the operation has consequences of all kinds. The economic ones happen because Nvidia pays 1,250 million dollars for not going ahead with the transaction. But there is more: the ARM CEO Simon Segars has resigned. He will be succeeded by Rene Haas, Head of Intellectual Property (IP) at ARM. According to SoftBank, ARM’s future plans now go through going public throughout the fiscal year that begins on April 1.
If carried out, the purchase of ARM by Nvidia, announced in September 2020, would have been one of the largest operations in the sector. Nvidia would have control of the company whose architecture and intellectual property are key to many chips in practically all smartphones and tablets that have been manufactured so far, as well as for those that are integrated into a good number of servers.
The agreement aroused all kinds of criticism and mistrust since it was announced, and the regulatory authorities of the United Kingdom, the United States or the European Union had announced the opening of investigations of the agreement. Everything pointed to the fact that the conclusions of several were going to lead to a veto due to monopoly problems.
The Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, had to defend the operation publicly several times, although he ended up admitting that the closing of the operation was going to take much longer than they initially thought. In the end, it will not be completed, because regulators in several countries, and even the FTC, which has tried to stop the purchase, did not trust what Nvidia was going to do with ARM’s intellectual property and designs and chips.
