Chipmaker Nvidia confirmed the planned acquisition of UK-based chip designer Arm in September for $40 billion in a combined stock-and-cash deal. The purchase sees the Japanese telco Softbank part with an asset it only acquired in 2016.
“Simon Segars and his team at Arm have built an extraordinary company that is contributing to nearly every technology market in the world. Uniting NVIDIA’s AI computing capabilities with the vast ecosystem of Arm’s CPU, we can advance computing from the cloud, smartphones, PCs, self-driving cars and robotics, to edge IoT, and expand AI computing to every corner of the globe,” Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA said in a statement.
Based in Cambridge, England, Arm designs chips for companies such as Nvidia and its rivals to manufacture. “As part of NVIDIA, Arm will continue to operate its open-licensing model while maintaining the global customer neutrality that has been foundational to its success, with 180 billion chips shipped to-date by its licensees,” the company said.
In terms of Nvidia’s commitment to the UK, it outlined in the announcement that “Arm will remain headquartered in Cambridge,” and the company will continue to “attract researchers and scientists from the UK and around the world.”
“I thought that Arm was the best tech company to come out of the UK in the last 50 years. I thought that its original sale to Softbank in 2016 for $32 billion was a mistake and should have been stopped by HMGovt at that time. I thought allowing Softbank to offload to Nvidia was an even bigger mistake on so many fronts,” analyst Richard Holway at TechMarketView said.
SOURCE Computer World
