In September 2020, NVIDIA announced that it would spend US$40 billion to acquire ARM. This was one of the world’s highest and most far-reaching semiconductor M&A transactions in recent years. At that time, NVIDIA was ambitious.
After the acquisition of ARM, coupled with NVIDIA’s leadership in GPU, they can not only strengthen their competitiveness in the mobile, data center and other markets, but they may eventually reshape the CPU+GPU market.
This ambitious goal, in turn, has also affected the acquisition transaction. Now that one year has passed, the process of NVIDIA swallowing ARM is not smooth. Major countries and regions around the world have not approved it. The US antitrust agency may pass it, but the EU, Audits in the UK and China are still in progress.
According to recent news, the British Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) plans to use antitrust and national security as an excuse to conduct an in-depth investigation of NVIDIA’s $40 billion acquisition of British chip design company ARM.
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CMA head Andrea Coscelli said: We are worried that NVIDIA’s control of ARM will cause real problems for its competitors, limiting their access to key technologies, and ultimately stifling innovation in some important and growing markets.
Even if the UK passes, the next two audits will not be easy, and it will take a long time. Now there are only three or four months left before the deadline for the acquisition transaction, and NVIDIA’s hopes for a successful acquisition are getting smaller and smaller.
If NVIDIA fails to win ARM, how big will the impact be? Regarding this issue, analysts at Wedbush Securities said that even if the transaction is cancelled due to increased opposition, it will have little impact on NVIDIA -this statement can be regarded as reassurance for NVIDIA investors.
Prior to this, NVIDIA CEO Huang Renxun also made a similar statement, saying that the acquisition of ARM is good, but without ARM, NVIDIA will continue to develop.