NVIDIA Arm Deal Said to be Over According to Bloomberg

It appears that NVIDIA is getting ready to give up on its acquisition attempt of Arm, at least if news coming via Bloomberg is correct. Due to a paywall we can’t access the original story, but the reason for the possible end to the deal seems to be issues related to getting government approval. The US$40 billion deal has rubbed many of Arm’s partners the wrong way as well, as they don’t trust NVIDIA to continue to license future Arm based processor cores to them, had the deal gone through.

At the same time, Arm has tried to convince the UK government that it will suffer terribly if NVIDIA isn’t allowed to buy them, as the company claims to have lost ground to Intel and RISC-V over the past year. What’s also rather bizarre, is that Arm is claiming Qualcomm is one of its competitors, despite Qualcomm being one of its licensees. On top of that, Arm also claims that “Architectural licensees do not use Arm’s CPU designs. Arm architectural licensees create their own proprietary CPU designs using their own engineering teams”, as part of their reasoning as to why its customers are their competitors. We suggest reading the EE Times article linked in the sources below for more details with regards to the claims Arm has filed with the UK government. The deal with NVIDIA might not be quite over as yet, but it looks like Softbank might have to consider other alternatives for Arm, if it really falls through.