NVIDIA pulls out of $66 billion ARM purchase due to pressure from governments

NVIDIA, after a long period of waiting and repeated attempts, has officially announced the abandonment of a deal to acquire UK chip designer ARM for $66 billion. At the same time, the reason for the refusal is not even hidden – the official publication of the company states that this decision was made after many attempts to overcome resistance from state regulatory bodies in the US, UK and EU. Representatives of these states believe that the purchase of ARM by a private company will cause significant damage to the development of the semiconductor sector around the world, because NVIDIA itself is a client of ARM.

Surprisingly, ARM’s current owner, the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, won’t even return to NVIDIA the hefty $2 billion advance that the GPU maker was forced to pay before the deal was negotiated. Also, as a result of the cancellation of this transaction, ARM will undergo a change of leadership – instead of Simon Segars, who has been the CEO since 2013, Rene Haas, head of the intellectual property division, will manage the company. At the same time, the company itself, instead of selling to a major player, will go public — the management announced that the initial public offering will take place in March 2023.

It is worth recalling that NVIDIA originally planned to acquire ARM for an impressive amount in order to gain control over the technologies that the manufacturer needs to strengthen its position in the data center market. The management of the SoftBank conglomerate was itself interested in selling the asset, but the largest companies, including Qualcomm, Microsoft, Google, Microsoft, Samsung and Tesla, expressed their negative attitude towards this transaction, since they themselves depend on ARM technologies. And if NVIDIA bought the company, it would gain an unfair advantage in the electronics market, which, accordingly, would hit healthy competition.

Soon, state regulators got involved in the situation, which for a long time studied the situation for violations of the competitive environment, and on Monday, February 7, at a meeting, NVIDIA management decided to stop fighting in this direction.

Source: Trash Box

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