Nividia: Acquisition of ARM apparently failed

The takeover of ARM by Nvidia obviously does not seem to bear fruit. Rumor has it that the well-known graphics card manufacturer is already talking internally about a joint future being rather unrealistic. The reason for this is probably not a lack of interest on Nvidia’s part. Rather, the responsible antitrust authorities are rather pessimistic about permission.

Pressure from all sides

Better an end with horror than horror without an end? So or so similarly Nvidia seems to see just probably its purchase of ARM. With the developer for chip architectures, the graphics card manufacturer had ambitious goals in mind. But obviously, the company has now bowed to reality and realized that a purchase of the company would probably not stand up to antitrust scrutiny. With a purchase price of 40 billion US dollars, Nvidia would have been willing to do anything. The graphics card giant has not made this insight public itself. Rather, it is information that the news portal Bloomberg reports with reference to insiders.

The reason for the abandonment of the high-priced deal is probably, among other things, the bubbling in the executive floors of other ARM licensees. These were particularly critical of Nvidia’s position. After all, the company itself is an ARM licensee. But Nvidia also had to live with a lot of political headwind. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in particular got serious. The US competition authority filed a complaint against Nvidia’s takeover ambitions at the end of last year. Should the rumors now not prove true and Nvidia actually want to buy ARM after all, the lawsuit is likely to cause a long delay.

An expensive pleasure

Should Nvidia bow to the pressure, this by no means means means that the graphics card manufacturer will get away without any costs. Quite the contrary. SoftBank, the developer of ARM, was very careful to include a serious clause in the takeover agreement of almost one and a half years ago. This clause states that Nvidia has to pay a deposit of 1.25 billion US dollars if the takeover has not taken place by September 2022. That corresponds to about 25 percent of Nvidia’s average annual profit.