All the big news in tech
Biggest chip deal ever.
“Nvidia will gain access to a treasure trove of IP and engineering talent that could enable the company to quickly develop custom CPU architectures for its own use.”
After months of speculation and reports, Nvidia announced that it is acquiring ARM Limited from SoftBank in a transaction valued at US$40 billion. SoftBank “will remain committed to ARM’s long-term success through its ownership stake in Nvidia, expected to be under 10 percent,” signaling that Nvidia will gain full control of ARM. However, the transaction does not include ARM’s IoT Services Group, which remains with SoftBank.
The deal ranks as the largest semiconductor acquisition in history and marks the second-largest tech acquisition in history, behind Dell’s US$64 billion purchase of EMC. As expected, the ARM/Nvidia deal will be subject to regulatory approval and could take up to 18 months to finalise. ARM’s current licensees include industry leaders like Apple, Qualcomm, Amazon, and Samsung, among many others, and it remains to be seen how those companies will react to the acquisition.
Nvidia stated that it would remain committed to ARM’s open licensing model and customer neutrality, all while expanding ARM’s IP licensing portfolio with Nvidia’s GPU and AI technology. According to the press release, ARM licensees have already shipped over 180 billion chips based on the ARM architecture (22 billion in the last year), making the addition of Nvidia IP to that portfolio an enticing proposition.
ARM’s intellectual property will also remain registered in the UK, and Nvidia will “retain the name and strong brand identity of ARM.” ARM will remain headquartered in Cambridge, UK, and Nvidia announced that it would expand ARM’s R&D presence there with a new AI research and education centre that will house an ARM/Nvidia-powered AI supercomputer for research.
Nvidia will gain access to a treasure trove of IP and engineering talent that could enable the company to quickly develop custom CPU architectures for its own use, which would then further the company’s broadening push into the profit-rich data centre market. Nvidia has already paved the way for ARM integration with its GPUs through the recent introduction of CUDA support for ARM architectures, and now the company will have control of the underlying ARM ISA, too, enabling extremely tight integration into its solutions.