Nvidia’s parent company, SoftBank, has declared that the graphics giant will no longer spend $40 billion to acquire Arm. The Financial Times was the first to break the storey. As a result of the failure to complete the purchase, Nvidia will pay SoftBank $1.25 billion, and Arm CEO Simon Segars will step down and be replaced by Arm’s head of intellectual property Rene Haas, who, coincidentally, used to oversee Nvidia’s own Arm division a few years back.
As Haas explains to TechCrunch, “[Segars] has determined that, at this juncture of his career, the time and work required to take the company public, as well as all that goes along with it, is not something he wants to commit to.” And as a result, he has decided to step aside.” In his absence, I’m going to step up.”
According to reports, the deal, which was announced in September 2020, would have been one of the largest in the industry’s history, giving GPU manufacturer Nvidia control of a company whose architecture and intellectual property is critical to virtually every smartphone and tablet chip ever made, as well as a growing number of server chips, and Apple’s entire future product roadmap for its impressive Arm-powered laptop and desktop PCs. (Apple’s Arm laptop chips, introduced in late 2020, stunned the industry and put the rest of the industry on alert.)
SoftBank has officially announced that Arm will pursue an initial public offering (IPO) in the fiscal year that begins on April 1st, 2019.. Neither Nvidia nor AMD responded to The Verge’s request for comment, including declining to confirm or deny that the agreement had fallen through. Requests for response from SoftBank and Arm were not immediately returned.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has been forced to justify the acquisition in public on numerous occasions since it was announced, and the company has eventually admitted that it will take significantly longer to complete than originally expected. The transaction had been on the rocks for less than two weeks when Bloomberg reported that it was on its way out due to opposition from UK, EU, and US regulators concerned about what Nvidia may do if it acquired Arm. Also suing to halt the acquisition was the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).