Nvidia, makers of the most desirable bitcoin mining gear on the planet (and sometimes GPUs), has a big sad. Its proposed purchase of Arm, the British company responsible for most of the chips in your phone, is officially toast.
First announced in September 2020, the merger ran into trouble right off the bat. Sure, Arm parent company SoftBank could have used $40 billion (which ballooned to $66 billion in the interim). But Arm is too important a company to too many other tech-makers, according to regulators.
Nvidia won’t be a shot in the Arm
Regulators in Arm’s native UK, as well as the States, were opposed to the deal for various reasons. So were the likes of Microsoft and Qualcomm. Plus, you know, basically anyone who uses Arm’s reference designs to make processors. The point doesn’t matter now, though. SoftBank and Nvidia have officially pulled the plug on the deal.
Which doesn’t mean that Japanese owner SoftBank has given up on trying to offload Arm. Instead of selling to Nvidia, the company will be spun off in an initial public offering (IPO) “…within the fiscal year ending March 31, 2023.” That way, SoftBank doesn’t have to deal with Arm anymore, and all those massive companies with a vested interest can all own a bit of it. Oh, fine, regular humans can also buy stock, probably.
But everyone playing the corporate game does get a little prize to keep. Nvidia hangs on to a twenty-year license deal with Arm, and the chip designer gets to keep the $1.25 billion down-payment the GPU specialist paid back in 2020 when all this started. So that’s nice.
Source: Ars Technica