The purchase operation of ARM by NVIDIA was one of the most important news of the past year, but also one of the most controversial, and one of the most complicated. Since the interest of the green giant in the British firm was confirmed, there have been a series of movements that demonstrated a clear rejection of this purchase, something that we were able to reconfirm recently with the lawsuit filed by the FTC to block the purchase.
Over time, progress towards completing NVIDIA’s purchase of ARM has been minimal, if not non-existent. A multitude of entities have shown their concern about said operation, and reticence has only grown. This is understandable since, in the end, ARM is the company that is behind the most important CPU architecture in the mobile sector, and in a broad sense, that is, including both solutions for smartphones and tablets, and also for wearables.
The fact is that, according to several sources, it seems that NVIDIA would have tired of the situation and the obstacles that the possible purchase of ARM is having to face, and I’d be willing to throw in the towel, that is, to cease its attempt to purchase the British giant. It is not confirmed, but the truth is that it is something that does not lack sense, especially after the lawsuit filed by the FTC, which we have already referred to at the beginning of this article.
Holly Vedova, Director of the FTC Competition Bureau, commented on this topic that:
“Tomorrow’s technologies depend on maintaining the cutting-edge, competitive chip markets that we have today. This proposed settlement (by NVIDIA) would distort ARM’s incentives in chip markets, and would allow the combined firm to unfairly undermine NVIDIA’s rivals.”
In summary, the FTC believes that there would be a clear harm to free competition if NVIDIA buys ARM, that is, in the end, the key to this whole thing, but what if NVIDIA decides to throw in the towel? Well, it’s very simple, on the one hand ARM would continue to be in the hands of SoftBank, and on the other hand the Japanese investment firm I would not have to return them 1,250 million dollars that he received at the time from the green giant.
In the end, everything seems to indicate that SoftBank will end up launching an IPO to get rid of ARM, and to recoup the investment you made in it when you bought it back in 2016.
