Federal Trade The commission sued to block Nvidia’s acquisition of Arm, the semiconductor design company, saying the blockbuster deal would unfairly limit competition.
Holly Vedova, director of the FTC’s competition office, said: “The FTC is suing to block the largest semiconductor chip merger in history to prevent a chip corporation from impeding the innovation path for technologies. next generation. “The technologies of tomorrow depend on sustaining today’s competitive, advanced chip markets. The proposed deal would skew Arm’s incentives in the chip market and allow the company to combine unfairly weaken Nvidia’s competitors. ”
Nvidia Firstly announced Its intention to get Arm in September 2020. At that time, $40 billion deal, but since then, Arm’s stock price has skyrocketed, and cash and stock transaction costs have ballooned to $75 billion. The FTC lawsuit threatens to completely destroy the deal.
“As we move into the next step in the FTC process, we will continue to work to demonstrate that this transaction will benefit the industry and promote competition,” an Nvidia spokesperson told Ars. . “Nvidia is committed to maintaining Arm’s open licensing model and ensuring that its IP is available to all interested licensees, now and in the future.”
NS FTC is not the first government regulator to scrutinize the deal. In October, European Union announced that they are investigating the acquisition and last month UK Officials said they were concerned that the merger would threaten both competition and national security. Nvidia said Chinese regulators were also looking into the deal.
Much of the anxiety surrounding acquisitions stems from the fact that, for much of its history, Arm has been a relatively neutral player in the world of semiconductors, providing access to intellectual property. its intellectual property to nearly anyone willing to pay a licensing fee. In the complaint, the FTC calls Arm the “Switzerland” of the semiconductor industry. Customers fear that the Nvidia-Driven Arm will put them in the hands of a competitor, while governing body fears that the acquisition will threaten to topple a huge, thriving ecosystem that depends on architecture.
Arm started out as a niche, low-power semiconductor designer French fries for embedded systems and for mobile devices such as the Apple Newton and Palm Pilot. Over the years, as the performance of ARM chips has improved and the importance of energy efficiency has increased, semiconductors have found their way into a wider range of devices.
Arm designs and instruction sets are widely used today, appearing in everything from cell phones to servers, car airbag controllers and supercomputers. Recently, ARM chips have started to make inroads into the PC world, putting pressure on incumbents Intel and AMD. Apple’s M1 Chip showed how the architecture could compete with x86 designs, and others have begun to follow suit. Earlier this week, Qualcomm announced a new Snapdragon processor, dubbed 8cx Gen 3, that will run an ARM-specific version of its Windows.
Since the ARM architecture is low power and available to so many different companies, these chips have taken over the industry. Last year, companies sold 25 billion ARM chips, more than quadrupling since 2010.
Nvidia has also become an increasingly powerful player in the world of semiconductors. Its graphics cards became vital tools in machine learning and other artificial intelligence applications, and soon the company began selling chips suitable for high performance computer. Its mobile Tegra chips, licensed to Arm designs, powered a range of smartphones and Tesla’s infotainment systems in the mid-2010s, and they run side-by-side today. in Nintendo’s Switch.
