Nvidia and SoftBank would now be pessimistic about the expected green light from regulators. Unofficially, Nvidia would have even drawn a line under this major agreement.
According to the information gleaned by Bloomberg, Nvidia would be ready to abandon its plan to buy the British computer chip designer ARM, yet already negotiated for an impressive amount of 40 billion dollars.
It must be said that the operation alerted the competition authorities and was put on hold pending the verdict of the regulators. This major consolidation would pose a risk to the market, especially given the importance of ARM chips for a very large number of players. Nvidia has never ceased since then to temporize and review the initial planning for this acquisition. From now on, when it discusses the file with its partners, Nvidia would no longer be afraid to consider a failure of the takeover, quite simply.
So much so that SoftBank, the Japanese group that owns ARM, is currently preparing for the company to go public. It would be, for him, a way of disengaging in part from ARM while making profitable his initial investment. According to Bloomberg, publicly, Nvidia and SoftBank continue to refer to this operation as “in progress”, and no final decision has been made.
Plan B
However, the outcry against the takeover of ARM by Nvidia has been extremely strong in the industry, and it is not impossible that the indiscretions heard by the first interested parties on the side of the regulators are not encouraging, precipitating the establishment of a plan B. For Nvidia, this alternative could lead to the acquisition of another designer or type of chip, with less significant influence on the market than ARM. ARM’s success is largely due to its use of a neutral and open licensing approach, which could have changed in the event of a takeover by Nvidia, despite promises of a status quo.
“We remain hopeful that the transaction will be approved”, supports SoftBank for the moment, while Nvidia declares: “Our vision is that this transaction is an opportunity to accelerate ARM’s growth and drive competition and innovation.” Authorities in the UK, Europe and the US have launched investigations into the takeover. The British have also recently decided to deepen their investigation while, in the United States, the Federal Trade Commission took legal action to prevent the takeover from succeeding.