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FTC Crashes NVIDIA's Party by Suing to Block its $40 Billion Deal To Acquire Arm Holdings
NVIDIA is now facing the most stringent test yet to its planned acquisition of the chip designer Arm Holdings.
To wit, the US FTC is now suing NVIDIA to block the $40 billion deal. FTC Bureau of Competition Director, Holly Vedova, said in a statement:
"The FTC is suing to block the largest semiconductor chip merger in history to prevent a chip conglomerate from stifling the innovation pipeline for next-generation technologies."
Vedova went on to note:
"Tomorrow's technologies depend on preserving today's competitive, cutting-edge chip markets. This proposed deal would distort Arm's incentives in chip markets and allow the combined firm to unfairly undermine Nvidia's rivals."
Also at NYT, The Verge, and Reuters.
Previously;
Nvidia's $40 Billion ARM Acquisition: "All but Dead"?
European Commission Extends Probe of Nvidia's Arm Acquisition
(Score: 4, Informative) by TheRaven on Friday December 03 2021, @11:22AM (3 children)
Quite a few companies build SoCs using Arm's cores. Others use the specifications and certification to build compatible chips. The latter category includes Qualcomm, Apple, NVIDIA, and so on. Arm carefully maintains their neutrality and independence: all of their partners can contribute to the architecture design, Arm builds a consensus, and then provides reference implementations. They do not favour their own cores over third-party ones and they allow other companies to license the cores that they design implementing the specification. That also allow a very mix-and-match approach, you can use Arm's CPU cores with your own GPU, Arm's Mali GPU with your own CPU core, and so on. The concern with the acquisition is that NVIDIA would privilege their own cores and the combination of their GPU and CPU cores, restricting competition.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday December 03 2021, @11:45AM (2 children)
I have lost track, is Softbank still holding Arm?
Historical note, I bought into Softbank stock shortly after the Arm acquisition. Even with a Trump endorsement following soon after my purchase, it didn't jump high enough to fund an early retirement. It is actually quite amazing how insignificant Arm seems to be to the Softbank bottom line.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Friday December 03 2021, @01:52PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Friday December 03 2021, @04:54PM
Notice that the $40 billion Nvidia offered to buy Arm is not much more than the $31 billion SoftBank paid.
There is no good reason for Nvidia to buy Arm unless they plan to screw over the other licensees. Theoretically they could get a leg up on custom Arm CPU designs, but they can probably do that without an acquisition, just like Apple has.
RISC-V is waiting in the wings in case Arm is FUBAR, but it is a short-term hassle to switch to RISC-V. So most of the Arm licensees are bitterly opposed to the acquisition attempt.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]