A few weeks ago, we commented on the possibility that Nvidia could acquire ARM. It seems that this acquisition is nearer to completion and has passed a number of the alleged transaction, Nvidia could pay about 32 billion dollars for this deal.
Nvidia willing to take over ARM for 32 billion dollars
Nvidia is said to be the only company involved in concrete talks with SoftBank about the purchase at this point, and a deal could come about “in the next few weeks”, although nothing has been finalized yet. If the deal goes through, it would be one of the biggest deals in the computer chip business.
SoftBank bought ARM in 2016 for $31 billion, and ARM has only increased in value since then as its designs have increasingly become an integral part of Android and iOS devices alike. Microsoft already makes interface devices with ARM, and a version of Windows is designed for ARM; Apple has also recently announced that it is moving its Mac computers to ARM-based chipsets.
As SoftBank is trying to pay off its growing mountain of debt to appease troubled investors, a sale of ARM at the top could help strengthen the Japanese technology group’s finances.
Nvidia seems to be an interesting owner for ARM – although the company is a leader in GPUs (which ARM also designs), it has little to do with CPU or mobile hardware design outside of its Tegra mobile chipset series.
Owning ARM would give Nvidia much more power over the computer world in general and probably provoke strong regulatory control since Nvidia is an ARM customer and competes with other companies that also rely on ARM designs. We will keep you up to date.