Despite investigations around deal, NVIDIA CEO remains 'confident' about acquisition of Arm

By Sean Endicott
published

Despite several government agencies looking into NVIDIA's acquisition of Arm, NVIDIA's CEO remains confident that it will go through.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 review
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 review (Image credit: Harish Jonnalagadda / Windows Central)

What you need to know

  • NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang is "confident" that the $40 billion acquisition of Arm will go through.
  • The US Federal Trade Commission, UK Competitions and Markets Authority, and European Commission have all looked into the deal.
  • Huang believes that NVIDIA's purchase of Arm will bring innovation to the market.

NVIDIA's acquisition of Arm is set to be the biggest ever deal in the semiconductor industry, but before it goes through, it will have to clear some hurdles. The US Federal Trade Commission, UK Competitions and Markets Authority, and European Commission all opened investigations into the deal. Despite these investigations, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang is "confident" that the deal will go through.

Huang spoke on the topic during a conference call at Computex 2021 (via Bloomberg).

A main concern of regulators, and reportedly tech giants including Google, Qualcomm, and Microsoft, is that Arm may not stay manufacturer-neutral after it's acquired by NVIDIA. Since Arm makes processors for a massive number of phones, computers, and many other devices, a worry is that Arm may focus on helping out NVIDIA, creating an unfair playing field.

The UK Government is also looking at the deal from a national security angle.

Huang doesn't seem to think those concerns will halt the deal. "I expect this one to take 18 months, so that's later this year, early next year. I am confident about the transaction," said Huang. "Our companies are complementary, so we'll bring, by nature, innovations that come as a result of companies that come together and offer complementary things."

Huang also argues that Arm becoming part of NVIDIA would drive innovation, "The regulators are looking for: Is this good for competition? Is this pro-competitive and brings innovation to the market? Does it give customers more choice, does it give customers more offerings and more choice? said the CEO. "You could see that on the first principle that our companies are complementary."

With a deal of this size, it's safe to assume that we'll hear several more opinions and rulings before it goes through or is halted.

Sean Endicott
Sean Endicott
News Writer and apps editor

Sean Endicott brings nearly a decade of experience covering Microsoft and Windows news to Windows Central. He joined our team in 2017 as an app reviewer and now heads up our day-to-day news coverage. If you have a news tip or an app to review, hit him up at sean.endicott@futurenet.com (opens in new tab).

2 Comments
  • Yeah, I can't really see this being an issue mainly because Nvidia isn't in the CPU or APU space. I mean, maybe they might start creating phones and PC's, etc, but I kinda doubt it. They don't really have any reason not to sell to whoever wants them, and it's they can bring their GPU knowledge to ARM APU's then all it will do is create competition for the likes of Qualcomm, Intel and AMD (in the integrated CPU market). And the winners in that should be the consumers.
  • You're forgetting about Tegra lol. This is a bad deal for everyone except some execs at ARM / Softbank and a solely a major win for Nvidia. This deal needs to fail permanently. As this deal poses a risk to the entire supply chain as well as innovation. Many companies like mediatek are able to provide high end hardware at low price points is because of SoC designs. Say Nvidia wants to compete in that space later. They can easily engage in subterfuge and only provide a somewhat mediocre design and keep the best one for themselves. So during testing it would look like they just barely eeked out ahead. But that's the ploy, use that as a marketing lever. There are many other examples. Anything out of Nvidia about this deal is just spin. I'll give you a real world example. During the 4g lte spectrum auction, BT bought enough spectrum to cover most of the UK through a subsidiary saying it was to bolster their public WiFi and that they wouldn't compete with other cellular providers. It wasn't, it was a classic act of subterfuge. The other providers were left with crumbs to fight over and most of that went to EE. So now, EE (combination of T Mobile and Orange) already had a tonne of collective spectrum. Is first place in mobile data sector. So the prices of 4 G contracts goes up using “the fastest 4G network” as a marketing lever. Sometime later, BT enters the cellular marketing on the low end.
    Then buys out EE, so now between the two they have enough spectrum to cover the entire country. But thanks to anti monopoly laws and regs. BT and EE can never merge as a single entity. Otherwise prices for contracts would have gone through the roof. As all consumers are left with a subpar network (Three), some what middling (O2), the biggest glutton of all (EE). So now EE can use the best network in country to charge a premium. Reality, has a funny way of bringing down the fat cats. You know the nutcases who targeted cell towers due to inane Covid-19 conspiracy? They mostly targeted EE's towers lol... as a result EE was knocked off several pegs and people on EE ended up with crappier coverage than before lol.