NVIDIA makes its argument for why the Arm acquisition should go through

By Robert Carnevale
published

NVIDIA argues the merger will spur competition, not hinder it.

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

What you need to know

  • NVIDIA's Arm acquisition has been in limbo for many, many months, hitting numerous obstacles since it was set in motion back in 2020.
  • The troubled deal faces a lawsuit from the FTC as well as a probe from the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).
  • The UK government has published documentation on the situation, showcasing NVIDIA's argument for why it thinks the deal should be greenlit.

NVIDIA's seen no shortage of barriers when it comes to getting its Arm acquisition passed and completed. A bevy of regulatory bodies have either held up the process or directly stood in the way of it, as we're seeing with the FTC's lawsuit and China's lengthy review process. But now we have a closer look into another element of the merger's headaches: The ongoing UK probe.

The UK government has a website wherein you can peruse its Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) cases. One of the entries listed there is the NVIDIA-Arm merger. On the page associated with the case, there's a piece of documentation labeled "Main parties initial Phase 2 submission," which will take you to a PDF containing NVIDIA's counters to the UK regulatory concerns leveled against it. Here's a key excerpt from the document:

NVIDIA seeks to grow and enhance Arm's IP in PC, and to license it broadly, helping Arm to build an ecosystem in PC. NVIDIA's strategy would undeniably benefit Arm, the UK, and Arm customers worldwide, not harm competition. The Transaction will spur competition in Consoles, as NVIDIA will have an incentive to enhance Arm's IP to compete with x86 chips from Intel and AMD.

NVIDIA's full remarks in the document explain how these benefits would come to pass, but this particular paragraph sums it up. The merger will help everyone, including the UK, and competitors will be fine, according to the RTX GPU maker. It also made sure to namedrop its Cambridge-1 supercomputer, which it "built at its own expense and launched in the UK for medical research." If you're interested in this whole merger saga, the full document is worth a read.

Robert Carnevale
Robert Carnevale

Robert Carnevale is the News Editor for Windows Central. He's a big fan of Kinect (it lives on in his heart), Sonic the Hedgehog, and the legendary intersection of those two titans, Sonic Free Riders. He is the author of Cold War 2395. Have a useful tip? Send it to robert.carnevale@futurenet.com.

8 Comments
  • The narrative may sound all hunky dory but...
    It's still NVIDIA.
    They have a track record.
  • Nvidia should offer to move they headquarters to England. And probably that gonna solve problems with UK
  • I think nVidia should let Arm go bankrupt and then take it and really stick it to the Brit's! nVidia should just team up with TI and put them all to shame...
  • *Facepalm* wanting an independent SoC designer to become bankrupt so a greedy, profit driven corporation gobbles it up. Smh..
  • A company driven by a proprietary mindset.
    They already have access to the same ARM tech as everybody else so why buy it if not to put it to work doing exclusive proprietary products for NVIDIA?
    Look to DLSS: exclusive to their boards. Then AMD releases an *open* competitor that runs almost everwhere, including Nvidia's cards. Their response? Offering up a second-class "open" scaling system to blunt AMD's effort. Their best tech they reserve for themselves.
    With that in mind what we can expect is they'll use ARM to ensure they get the best designs first and license them out years later, if at all. Trust scorpions to be scorpions.
  • @fjtorres my thoughts too. In the end it's about two things for Nvidia - money and ego.
  • fjtorres, I believe nVidia's history supports your point, and I agree with the criticisms of their aggressive business practices. However, I don't think they've crossed any legal or ethical lines. Even if they do those things, IF they're telling their truth that they want to compete with AMD and Intel (something that could be easily forced by requiring releasing products for PC usage or suffer penalties or even a forced unwinding of the acquisition), that would still be increasing competition overall (just not in the specific space of mobile). In the most positive case, we could see the very interesting bridging of PC and mobile work and competition across both industries, where finally Microsoft's vision of mobile computing becomes a reality. I acknowledge this may be a stretch, but it's even less likely to happen in the near term if we leave things to the status quo. I'm not personally an advocate for this acquisition, because I agree with the negatives people are raising about nVidia, but I think we all need to demand a very, very high bar for government interference in these situations. For me (not necessarily the law), the burden of proof should be on the blocking governments to prove that nVidia's ARM acquisition will cause harm, not on nVidia to prove it won't. For example, if those opposing governments could prove that nVidia has designs to purely reduce competition absent increases to innovation, then I would support the block. Otherwise, we're just trusting a government to predict the future over entrepreneurs. That's the opposite of what we should be doing -- entrepreneurs have historically shown themselves to be many-fold better at predicting what will help consumers and the marketplace than government bureacrats. Turning this over to governments is just plain undermining to capitalism. Or to put it another way, just because I don't like nVidia, doesn't mean I should be allowed to stop them from spending their money on what they want. I wouldn't want my enemies or adversaries telling me how I can spend my money, and I prefer not to be a hypocrite.
  • Ofc that's what Nvidia would say and it's utter b.s.