Nvidia will buy chip designer for $40 billion.

SANTACLARA>> Nvidia, a Silicon Valley graphics chip maker riding a hot streak, has reached a deal to buy a British chip designer, betting the transaction can propel Nvidia to a leadership position in a new computer era powered by artificial intelligence, the tech titan said Sunday.

“AI is the most powerful technology force of our time and has launched a new wave of computing,” Jensen Huang, founder and chief executive of Nvidia, referring to artificial intelligence, said in a blog post Sunday.

Santa Clara-based Nvidia has agreed to pay $40 billion to buy Arm, an England-based unit of tech titan Softbank.

“In the years ahead, trillions of computers running AI will create a new internet-of-things that is thousands of times larger than today’s internet-of-people,”

Huang said in the blog post on the Nvidia website.

In a previous blog post, Nvidia made it clear that it intended to become an ever-bigger player in the new and increasingly connected world of artificial intelligence.

“A scalable, accelerated platform is necessary to drive decisions in real-time and allow every industry — including retail, manufacturing, healthcare, and smart cities — to deliver automated intelligence to the point of action,” Nvidia said in the prior blog post.

Over the years, Nvidia has marched far beyond its early territories of cutting-edge graphics chips for computer and video games.

“Arm and Nvidia share a vision and passion that ubiquitous, energy-efficient computing will help address the world’s most pressing issues from climate change to healthcare, from agriculture to education,” said Simon Segars, ARM chief executive.

During the 12 months that ended in July, Nvidia earned $3.39 billion on revenue of $13.06 billion, according to the Yahoo Finance site.

“We can advance computing from the cloud, smartphones, PCs, self-driving cars and robotics, to the Internet of Things, and expand artificial intelligence computing to every corner of the globe,” Nvidia said.