Quote:NVIDIA and SoftBank Group Corp. (SBG) today announced a definitive agreement under which NVIDIA will acquire Arm Limited from SBG and the SoftBank Vision Fund (together, "SoftBank") in a transaction valued at $40 billion. The transaction is expected to be immediately accretive to NVIDIA's non-GAAP gross margin and non-GAAP earnings per share.

Quote:SoftBank purchased Arm in 2016 for $31 billion. Journalist Alistair Barr points out that when SoftBank paid that price, Nvidia was worth just $30 billion (a huge sum, but paltry in comparison), and adds that Nvidia has generated $40 billion in market value since rumors of the purchase first hit in July.

This purchase will certainly kick off all manner of regulatory investigation. Bloomberg notes that China, the UK, the European Union, and US authorities must sign off on the deal. That process may take well over a year, past Nvidia’s estimated purchase completion date of September 2021. Arm customers like Apple are sure to raise a stink, too; That’s despite Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s assurance that he doesn’t want to do anything to scare off existing clients. Current owner SoftBank is more of a holdings company and doesn’t otherwise compete with any of Arm’s competitors the way Nvidia does.

Nvidia’s purchase of Arm is going to be in the news for months if not years to come. Already, though, this is considered the biggest purchase ever in the semiconductor industry.

Quote:NVIDIA's planned acquisition of Arm was one of 2020's defining moments for the tech industry, and many articles have already been written on the possible industry-wide consequences of this acquisition. However, the resulting NVIDIA company could raise some questions as to business practices and competition - critics, technologists, and lobbyists have already been working hard in calling the deal's attention to regulating authorities. And that seems to be paying off, as UK's Competition and Markets Authority announced Wednesday that it plans to investigate NVIDIA's proposed acquisition of British chip designer Arm.

This effort by the CMA will take place in a staggered way, where the regulator is for now asking for third party input on the deal and its consequences for British competition and the tech industry at large, before launching its official probe later this year. As is always the case with these sort of deals, some in the field expect the deal to be blocked, including Arm co-founder Hermann Hauser; others, however, speak to its eventual success. NVIDIA's share price has kept dropping ever since the announcement, from a high of $536.31 to $506.21 at time of writing.

Quote:Major American tech companies are joining in on calls for antitrust enforcement against Nvidia’s forthcoming acquisition of ARM, according to Bloomberg. This follows news from earlier this January that UK authorities would be performing their own investigation into the merger, as ARM is a UK-based licenser.

According to Bloomberg’s sources, the group of companies calling for these extra checks includes Google, Microsoft and Qualcomm, with at least one of the three wanting “the deal killed.”
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As for the impetus behind the outcry, it likely comes from battles over data center control. While consumer tech enthusiasts might not immediately consider companies like Nvidia and Microsoft to be rivals, data centers were key to Nvidia’s growth last year. And given that many companies, like Microsoft, are either already using or are currently moving to ARM-based chips for their data centers, Nvidia’s ARM purchase could spell bad news for them if the merger goes through.

Quote:Nvidia believes it will be able to assuage these various fears once its proposed purchase goes before various regulatory bodies. “As we proceed through the review process, we’re confident that both regulators and customers will see the benefits of our plan to continue Arm’s open licensing model and ensure a transparent, collaborative relationship with Arm’s licensees,” an Nvidia spokesperson said in a statement. “Our vision for Arm will help all Arm licensees grow their businesses and expand into new markets.”

One way regulators may handle these concerns is to require certain concessions and promises from Nvidia regarding long-term ARM product development, licensing, and pricing. Nvidia itself could probably soothe tensions if it released more data on what it plans to do with ARM, post-acquisition. Nvidia is an ARM licensee, but its ARM business is focused on AI processing and the automotive market, with a little consumer crossover with devices like the Shield TV.

There are a lot of ARM licensees who build CPUs using the Cortex-R and Cortex-M families. These embedded and real-time processors represent markets Nvidia hasn’t typically served with its own products, and their users could be understandably nervous about Nvidia’s long-term plans for these spaces. Additional clarity on how the purchase would impact these customers, specifically, would probably be helpful.

Finally, we suspect Microsoft, Google, and Qualcomm are all wary of being trapped in an x86-like licensing scenario. One of the points ARM always emphasizes when discussing its own strong points versus x86 is the fact that its customers enjoy far more freedom (and, in many cases, better margins) than PC OEMs like HP, Dell, or Lenovo. Google and Microsoft have both launched chip development efforts this year, while Qualcomm recently bought Nuvia, an ARM server design company.

Amazon hasn’t been mentioned in these stories, but it’s also deploying its own ARM-based Graviton2 servers. Any significant change to ARM’s licensing model or its cost structure could impact a lot of customer long-term planning and cost analysis.

Nvidia clearly has a lot of legwork to do if it wants to convince regulators and its own potential future customers that it will be a worthy custodian to the ARM brand and business model. There’s clearly real pushback against this deal across the industry, and it’s not just coming from some of the original ARM founders.