Nvidia, SoftBank Abandon $40 Billion USD Arm Acquisition

Nvidia and SoftBank have confirmed the termination of the Arm acquisition, which has faced multiple investigations since it was first announced.

Graphics giant Nvidia will no longer be spending $40 billion USD to acquire Arm, parent company SoftBank has announced, citing “significant regulatory challenges.”

“Arm has a bright future, and we’ll continue to support them as a proud licensee for decades to come,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said yesterday. “Arm is at the centre of the important dynamics in computing. Though we won’t be one company, we will partner closely with Arm.”

“I expect Arm to be the most important CPU architecture of the next decade,” he added.

SoftBank said it now plans to pursue an IPO for Arm in 2023, in developments reported earlier by the Financial Times on Monday. The IPO is estimated to be worth as much as $80 billion USD.

Masayoshi Son, CEO of SoftBank, said: “Arm is becoming a centre of innovation not only in the mobile phone revolution, but also in cloud computing, automotive, the internet of things and the metaverse, and has entered its second growth phase.”

Since NVIDIA announced its plan to acquire Arm back in September 2020, the company faced various hurdles starting with the UK government threatening to intervene on national security grounds. After the US Federal Trade Commission sued to block the acquisition back in December 2021, it seemed like the writing was already on the wall.

It is unclear what the future of Arm may be, but it doesn’t seem that its future involves NVIDIA.

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