nVidia’s Market-Disrupting ARM Acquisition Not a Done Deal

The European Commission, the FTC, and others are now opposing the merger — probably for good reason, too

British microprocessor designer ARM was sold to nVidia in September 2020, but the deal is not yet completed and, if EU and US regulators succeed in their recent efforts, it may never be. (Image: ARM)

If anything, it now seems to be one of the most underestimated acquisitions in the history of tech: when nVidia announced that it’s buying ARM from Softbank for 40 billion dollars, all the way back in September 2020, it was considered to be a big deal but not a market-disrupting one. Everyone was focused on what nVidia would do to enter new markets with ARM’s know-how in low-consumption processors and what ARM could do with nVidia’s know-how in graphics processing. Consumers, as well as enterprise customers, were supposed to benefit from synergies between the two companies. But then a few important things came into focus… and now the deal is under scrutiny in both Europe and the US, with China and the UK following suit.

And that — despite the initial enthusiasm about this merger — is actually a good thing.

So what happened? A number of things, but mainly this: ever since the acquisition’s announcement, we’ve all been commenting on it under the impression that nVidia would allow ARM to operate in the “neutral” way it always has, but European and American regulators are now highly skeptical of that scenario. ARM…