Tuesday, February 8th 2022
NVIDIA Acquisition of Arm Collapses, UK Company to Seek IPO
NVIDIA's long-awaited acquisition of Arm Ltd. is collapsing, confirm Financial Times and Reuters. According to the latest information, the deal is not happening, and the previously agreed terms are no longer valid. As we now know, NVIDIA will have to pay Softbank (Arm's owner) a break-up fee of $1.25 billion, which was the deal that the two settled on if the acquisition fails. NVIDIA has originally planned to purchase Arm for $40 billion. However, the regulators from UK and EU have been blocking the deal from happening on the terms that it would hurt competition and block innovation.
What is next for Arm Ltd. is to go public and list itself on one of the world's biggest stock exchanges, either domestically or overseas in the US. The IPO efforts of Arm are estimated to be worth around $80 billion, representing a double amount of what NVIDIA wanted to purchase the company for.
Update 08:35 UTC: Here is the official press release from NVIDIA and Softbank below:
Source:
via Reuters
What is next for Arm Ltd. is to go public and list itself on one of the world's biggest stock exchanges, either domestically or overseas in the US. The IPO efforts of Arm are estimated to be worth around $80 billion, representing a double amount of what NVIDIA wanted to purchase the company for.
NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) and SoftBank Group Corp. ("SBG" or "SoftBank") today announced the termination of the previously announced transaction whereby NVIDIA would acquire Arm Limited ("Arm") from SBG. The parties agreed to terminate the Agreement because of significant regulatory challenges preventing the consummation of the transaction, despite good faith efforts by the parties. Arm will now start preparations for a public offering.
"Arm has a bright future, and we'll continue to support them as a proud licensee for decades to come," said Jensen Huang, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of NVIDIA. "Arm is at the center of the important dynamics in computing. Though we won't be one company, we will partner closely with Arm. The significant investments that Masa has made have positioned Arm to expand the reach of the Arm CPU beyond client computing to supercomputing, cloud, AI and robotics. I expect Arm to be the most important CPU architecture of the next decade."
SBG today also announced that, in coordination with Arm, it will start preparations for a public offering of Arm within the fiscal year ending March 31, 2023. SBG believes Arm's technology and intellectual property will continue to be at the center of mobile computing and the development of artificial intelligence.
"Arm is becoming a center of innovation not only in the mobile phone revolution, but also in cloud computing, automotive, the Internet of Things and the metaverse, and has entered its second growth phase," said Masayoshi Son, Representative Director, Corporate Officer, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer of SoftBank Group Corp. "We will take this opportunity and start preparing to take Arm public, and to make even further progress."
Mr. Son continued, "I want to thank Jensen and his talented team at NVIDIA for trying to bring together these two great companies and wish them all the success."
NVIDIA and SBG had announced that they had entered into a definitive agreement, under which NVIDIA would acquire Arm from SoftBank, on September 13, 2020. In accordance with the terms of the agreement, SBG* will retain the $1.25 billion prepaid by NVIDIA, which will be recorded as profit in the fourth quarter, and NVIDIA will retain its 20-year Arm license.
* 24.99% of Arm shares are attributable to SoftBank Vision Fund 1.
94 Comments on NVIDIA Acquisition of Arm Collapses, UK Company to Seek IPO
Their comment indeed was quite shortsighted.
Koko's definitely smarter than this...
In any case, I feel this article is quite confusing. The header says" Nvidia acquisition of ARM collapses", but the body of the article says "collapsing". The former means it already collapsed/ failed, while the latter suggests that it is failing, but not conclusive.
That's not even getting into any old handheld game consoles (The GBA, all variants of the DS, and the PS Vita, for example, are all ARM-based) or smart TVs he might have.
Seriously, almost anything and everything around you that needs some kind of processing, has an ARM based chip in them.
So yes, you most likely own a lot more ARM based products than you think.That's the dumbest statement yet from you in this thread. :kookoo:
The fact that routers can be compromised is largely related to the software running on them and it being outdated, poorly configured or even in some cases, having hard coded passwords by the manufacturer. It has nothing to do with the processor inside them. A lot of lower-end routers actually use MIPS based processors, although this is quickly declining.
As long as SoftBank retains 51% of the voting shares, they're in control.
I presume you've never owned a business?
Pretty sure they will be breaking up social media soon, seems to be the rhetoric, so I would not be surprised if ARM is on that list next
Arm licenses IP, they don't make any products. As such, a company that wants to make a processor of some kind, goes to Arm, pays them a license fee and then design a chip based around their processor IP. The fact that there's a common processor IP for these low-power chips, means that it's in general easier for these companies to offer software for their chips, since they can use commonly used bits of Linux, Android or some RTOS for their products, instead of having to reinvent the wheel on their own.
There are plenty of competitors in the MCU space, such as MIPS, Arc, RISC-V (more recent addition), good old Intel 8051 and various other more or less proprietary solutions like STM8/10/32, various PIC16/18/24/33 chips and so on.
However, once you move up to chips that need to be able to run a full-on OS, you have much more limited options, especially as MIPS is dying a slow death, PowerPC is mostly dead outside of the server space and many other CPU architectures that have died a slow death over the past 20 years or so. Arm has offered a solution that has gained popularity in just about every market niche, because they're considered reliable and cost effective to work with, but this isn't something Arm has done on its own, but it's rather something its partners have chosen to do.
Apple's own CPUs are based on the Arm architecture, but has grown into its own branch that isn't nearly as compatible as some other chips based on Arm's IP out there.
There is nothing to break up, since as explained, Arm is not a monopoly, since anyone can license their technology and use it in their chips. Well, maybe not North Korean and Iran, but hey...
So if ARM licensed say... IP to make a chip to put on say the RGB of a gtx 1070, and this chip was made in China, how do we know that telemetry of some kind is not built in to that RGB arm chip on the gtx 1070? Just curious... a hypothetical scenario... if you will... I only ask because I remember reading something like this once:
www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies
full disclose i only read like the first paragraph there, but yeah
On the other hand, if you buy a chip made by a company in the PRC, they could've put anything they want in there, just like a US, Taiwanese, Japanese, Korean, German, French or Italian chip maker could.
I presume you got the RGB controller example from the post above? Just FYI, Holtek is a Taiwanes company.