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Nvidia to buy Arm Holdings From SoftBank for $40 Billion

takyon writes:

Nvidia to buy Arm Holdings from SoftBank for $40 billion

Chipmaker Nvidia has agreed to buy Arm Holdings, a designer of chips for mobile phones, from SoftBank in a deal worth $40 billion, the companies announced Sunday. The deal will include $21.5 billion in Nvidia stock and $12 billion in cash, including $2 billion payable at signing.

Softbank acquired Arm in 2016 for $31.4 billion in 2016 in one of its largest acquisitions ever. Arm is best known as the designer of an architecture used in chips in most mobile phones, including the Qualcomm chips used in most Android phones, as well as Apple's iPhone. Apple is also planning to shift its Mac computers from Intel chips to an Arm-based design.

Nvidia, whose chips are widely used to support graphics and artificial intelligence applications, including for self-driving vehicles, pledged that it would "continue Arm's open-licensing model and customer neutrality."

Interest in RISC-V set to skyrocket again.

Also at Bloomberg, The Verge, Tom's Hardware, and Wccftech.

Previously: Nvidia's Market Cap Rises Above Intel's
Nvidia Considering Acquisition of ARM for Over $32 Billion

Nvidia Buys ARM Holdings From SoftBank for $40 Billion

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Nvidia buys ARM Holdings from SoftBank for $40 billion:

SoftBank has agreed to sell Arm Holdings to US chip company Nvidia for $40bn, ending four years of ownership as the Japanese technology group shifts towards becoming a global investment and asset management powerhouse.

The UK chip designer is the latest large asset disposal orchestrated by SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son as his newly built war chest opens up options for the group including an expansion of trading into publicly listed technology stocks and a potential delisting of its own shares.

Under the deal, SoftBank will become the largest shareholder in Nvidia, which will pay the Japanese group $21.5bn in common stock and $12bn in cash. "We look forward to supporting the continued success of the combined business," Mr Son said in a joint statement late on Sunday.

[...] While Nvidia is paying more for the asset than SoftBank did, the price also reflects the scale of Arm's underperformance under the Japanese group's ownership.

Nvidia had a market valuation of roughly similar to that of Arm's at the time of the 2016 deal, but now trades with a market value of $300 billion, or roughly 10 times the amount SoftBank paid in cash for Arm. By paying for a large portion of the deals with its own shares, it is also passing part of the risk of the transaction to SoftBank.

[...] For Nvidia, which recently overtook Intel to become the world's most valuable chipmaker, the deal will further consolidate the US company's position at the centre of the semiconductor industry. The British chip designer's technology is starting to find broader applications beyond mobile devices, in data centres and personal computers including Apple's Macs.

Arm would transform Nvidia's product line-up, which until now has largely focused on the high end of the chips market. Its powerful graphics processors—which are designed to handle focused, data-intensive tasks—are typically sold to PC gamers, scientific researchers and developers of artificial intelligence and self-driving cars, as well as cryptocurrency miners.

Official announcement at Nvidia.

Also at: BBC, cnet, NYT.

Original Submission #1 Original Submission #2