Monday, April 19th 2021
UK Stalls NVIDIA's Acquisition of Arm to Investigate "National Security Concerns"
The UK government has stalled NVIDIA's $40 billion acquisition of Arm by constituting an investigation in "public interest." This investigation will look into the national security implications to the UK, of the acquisition. Although Arm is being transacted between Japan's SoftBank Holdings and American NVIDIA, Arm itself is a UK-based entity. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) will lead the investigation, and file a report with the UK government by June 30, 2021.
NVIDIA responded to the development, stating that the acquisition has no material national-security issues affecting the UK. "We will continue to work closely with the British authorities, as we have done since the announcement of this deal," NVIDIA stated. Leading tech firms, namely Google, Qualcomm, and Microsoft, etc., voiced apprehensions over the deal. Unlike SoftBank, NVIDIA is a chip-designer in its own right, and could withhold cutting-edge Arm technology to itself, giving its CPUs/SoCs a competitive edge over other Arm licensees, these firms believe.
Source:
Reuters
NVIDIA responded to the development, stating that the acquisition has no material national-security issues affecting the UK. "We will continue to work closely with the British authorities, as we have done since the announcement of this deal," NVIDIA stated. Leading tech firms, namely Google, Qualcomm, and Microsoft, etc., voiced apprehensions over the deal. Unlike SoftBank, NVIDIA is a chip-designer in its own right, and could withhold cutting-edge Arm technology to itself, giving its CPUs/SoCs a competitive edge over other Arm licensees, these firms believe.
19 Comments on UK Stalls NVIDIA's Acquisition of Arm to Investigate "National Security Concerns"
I do not agree , not at all Sir'i to agree that "God" knows what "telemetry" it wants because it ain't like that the sealed box the graphics card came in also contained al blank check or something.
OTOH Nvidia buying and screwing ARM was going to lead to RISC-V finally gaining traction. I'd still like to see that.
If nVidia would've wanted to buy ARM for the mere competency, they would've strived for some acquisition of it already years ago. Since their struggling on core-competency aside from anything graphics has lacked quite a bit the recent years (Tegra et al.). Precisely, and that's like exactly why there's so much opposition.
Granted, their end-goal may be not wanting to kill ARM eventually. However, their way of very likely milking the living penny off ARM's licensing-model and to
squeeze outeffectively robbing ARM's licencees with sky-high and absurd pricy license-fees – That is what actually not only will harming ARM's licensing-model severe but will inevitably kill ARM as a whole.Them undoubtedly going to make severe anti-competitive changes to either ARM's business-model (license-fee percentage, locking out crucial bits for licensees/competitors) and/or going to stop licensing elementary ARM-designs out to their competitors and using it nVidia-exclusive further down the line after the deal have closed for them, is, what stirring up such massive renitency and fierce industrial opposition even by rather neutral bystanders – not to mention any competitors.
… and very few have any greater doubt that nVidia really would want to pull that leverage on increasing license-fees for higher profits, they likely wouldn't want to resist that urge. Since nVidia is just that what they always were: Greedy.
Them only wanting to buy ARM *now*, for making ARM their nice and steady Dollar-printing machine sure enough just the moment it becomes crucial enough to be system-relevant (especially within the datacentre- industrial- & server-space; ARM will rise in the server-space inescapably while x86 will decline!), is something you can only be worried about.
… and all that is, what everyone involved know (from anti-trust, cartel-authorities to competitors all around the world) is going to happen, if nVidia gets their hands on ARM. Hence the opposition.
If nVidia would've wanted to buy ARM say 5–10 years earlier, the opposition would've been way lower … ∎
Xilinx doesn't happen to be the industry's tip of the scale when in comes to a whole industry architectural basis, right?
AMD acquiring Xilinx is pretty much exactly the same as back then when Intel bought up Altera, both complement each other.