Presented for the first time months ago, and being a clear objective for both users and regulators, finally NVIDIA has just officially announced the withdrawal of its offer and plans to purchase ARMthe well-known company that licenses the chip technology used in most smartphones.
In this statement, the company explains that the agreement failed this same Monday, February 7, after a year and a half of negotiations with Softbank. On the one hand, ARM’s customers, Qualcomm and Microsoft, opposed the deal, raising concerns that NVIDIA could prevent ARM from licensing its chip designs.
Even if the real pressure came from the character of this massive acquisitiona purchase that would have been the largest in the chip sector, was also subject to intense scrutiny from regulators. Specifically, the UK Competition and Markets Authority was investigating on two occasions the possible impact that this acquisition could have on the prices and quality of the products, as well as its implications for national security, and even its monopolistic nature. . Arguments similar to those presented by the European Union and the United States, which presented different investigations and lawsuits for fear that it would suppress competition for multiple technologies.
Something that has not prevented Jensen Huang, executive director of NVIDIA, from wanting to anticipate part of what the nearest future will bring us: “ARM has a bright future and we will continue to support them as a licensee proud for decades to come”, assuring that “Although we will not be a single company, we will partner closely with ARM. I expect ARM to be the most important CPU architecture of the next decade«.
On the other hand, SoftBank confirmed that it would make ARM public, although it did not provide any further details beyond the statement by Masayoshi Son, CEO of SoftBank: “ARM is becoming a center of innovation not only in the mobile phone revolution, but also in cloud computing, automotive, the Internet of Things and the metaverse, and has entered its second phase of growth […] We will seize this opportunity and we will start preparing to make ARM public and make even more progress«.
