After weeks of speculation and rumors, Softbank has finally agreed to sell Arm to Nvidia. The acquisition will cost Nvidia $40 Billion, which is $8 Billion more than what Softbank paid for the company back in 2016. The deal will enable Nvidia to design its own CPU hardware and mobile chips.
Nvidia officially announced the deal yesterday stating that the acquisition will help the company grow its AI computing platform. Nvidia believes that the AI sector is the next big thing, and ARM will help the company grow in this sector. Arm licenses its designs and architecture to a huge chunk of the electronics market, and many of the companies that use ARM designs are Nvidia’s competitors. This acquisition might lead to some companies exploring other alternatives such as RISC-V. Nvidia has stated that “as part of NVIDIA, ARM will continue to operate its open-licensing model while maintaining the global customer neutrality that has been foundational to its success.” Apple iPads and iPhones use Apple’s own processors which are based on ARM architecture, and recently Apple announced that it will be shifting its entire Mac line-up from Intel processors to its own custom ARM based processors. However the problem is Apple and Nvidia don’t really get along. This acquisition might prove to be a problem for Apple who has stopped using Nvidia GPU’s in its products ever since Nvidia supplied Apple with faulty GPU’s back in 2008.
The deal is a major problem for Chinese electronic manufactures as well as ARM will now be an American owned company. The recent trade war between China and America has seen companies like Huawei suffer heavily, and if ARM decides to stop sharing its designs and licenses with Chinese companies, it will be a huge blow for China. The deal between Nvidia and Softbank for ARM will face heavy scrutiny from regulatory authorities, but as Nvidia does not directly compete with ARM, the deal will most probably go through.
