Wednesday, September 30th 2020
China Could Reject NVIDIA-Arm Deal, Predicts Former Lenovo Chief Engineer
In big corporate mergers and acquisitions involving multi-national corporations, money is the easy part, with the hard part being competition regulators of major markets giving their assent. The NVIDIA-Arm deal could get entangled in the US-China tech trade-war, with Beijing likely to use its approval of the deal as a bargaining chip against the US. Former Lenovo chief engineer Ni Guangnan predicts that the Chinese government's position would be to try and fight the deal on anti-trust grounds, as it could create a monopoly of chip-design tools. China's main concern, however, would be Arm IP falling into the hands of a US corporation, the California-based NVIDIA, which would put the IP under US export-control regulations.
Both Arm and NVIDIA announced an agreement for the latter to acquire Arm from SoftBank in a deal valued at USD $40 billion. NVIDIA CEO has been quoted as calling it the "deal of the century," as it would put NVIDIA in control of the biggest CPU machine architecture standard after Intel's x86, letting it scale the IP from low-power edge SoCs, to large data-center processors. Chinese regulators could cite recent examples of US export controls harming the Chinese tech industry, such as technology bans over Huawei and SMIC, in its action against the NVIDIA-Arm deal. Arm's 200-odd Chinese licensees have shipped over 19 billion chips based on the architecture as of mid-September 2020.
Source:
South China Morning Post
Both Arm and NVIDIA announced an agreement for the latter to acquire Arm from SoftBank in a deal valued at USD $40 billion. NVIDIA CEO has been quoted as calling it the "deal of the century," as it would put NVIDIA in control of the biggest CPU machine architecture standard after Intel's x86, letting it scale the IP from low-power edge SoCs, to large data-center processors. Chinese regulators could cite recent examples of US export controls harming the Chinese tech industry, such as technology bans over Huawei and SMIC, in its action against the NVIDIA-Arm deal. Arm's 200-odd Chinese licensees have shipped over 19 billion chips based on the architecture as of mid-September 2020.
59 Comments on China Could Reject NVIDIA-Arm Deal, Predicts Former Lenovo Chief Engineer
But China really hasn't got much to lean on here.
Everyone knows that whatever tech that they can't build, buy or license, they just steal through industrial espionage and/or backdoor hacking anyways, so why would they even bother trying to block this deal, other than to just display a show of force ....
If Trump wins the election China will say NO, if Biden win's they could accept deal with guarantees BUT that is still a maybe. After another four year's there could be a new republican president blocking ARM tech to China.
I doubt Chine will approve the deal.
If nvidia moved HQ to a neutral country China could approve the deal.
Blocking ARM tech to China is just one of the options and it can be done.
Because of Americas paranoia over China, it will be a problem. I don't think it's right blocking China from buying Arms products.
Clearly the wrong word in this situation.
I'd prefer if ARM went back to the UK, though. It feels like a lot of IP is getting concentrated in the US. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it doesn't feel like a good thing in the long run, either.
With what ARM China has been doing recently, they're probably just trying to delay this deal until ARM China has finished going completely rogue with the inevitable blessing of whichever Chinese domestic court Allen Wu went whimpering to, complaining that it was unjust for ARM HQ to fire him. I guess that's what happens when you make a joint venture with China in which you let them take the reins.
This timing is no coincidence. This is politics through and through, except until now everyone can plausibly deny that. With the recent movements of ARM in China, the overall pressure on fab capacity and China announcing its own masterplan to catch up on all the things they've been losing access or just can't pursue the state of the art of, I think its very clear that governments, countries are moving to secure technology. The first step is playing that by the market's rules, at least at first glance. You can rest assured there is a full strategic lobby behind all of that with many stakeholders involved.
It wasn't too long ago China was in near self-isolation economically, they're rapidly moving that way except now they aren't the ones choosing to do so.
Our media is known for the occasional gaff but mixing up China and Japan is next level xD
In all seriousness though, they just protest because it will make it harder for them to steal IP, which seems to be the main way China can push their own technology forward. It won's stop them from buying end products, so no actual harm done.