Arm Holdings takeover: has Nvidia had its chips?

The $40bn acquisition of British semiconductor manufacturer Arm Holdings by America’s Nvidia has been left hanging in the balance, says Amy Thomson on Bloomberg. The culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, says the government may intervene to prevent the tie-up. Dowden has ordered the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which is already looking at the impact on competition, to investigate the national security aspects of the deal too. 

He notes that the semiconductors are not only “fundamental” to a “wide range of technologies”, including those in defence and national security, but also “underpin the UK’s critical national infrastructure”. Nvidia’s ownership could bring Arm under the “control of powerful US national security laws” that could one day be “used against Britain’s interests”, says Hannah Boland in The Daily Telegraph.

The next US tech monopoly

National security concerns aren’t the only reason why some are opposing the deal, says Mark Sweney in The Guardian. Hermann Hauser, Arm’s original co-founder, has argued that it would be “an absolute disaster for Cambridge, the UK and Europe”, as Nvidia would inevitably decide to relocate Arm to the US, leading to lost jobs. 

More importantly, being owned by Nvidia would also destroy Arm’s “even-handed” model of licensing its chip designs to a wide range of technology companies, including Apple, Samsung and Qualcomm, turning the combined company into “the next US tech monopoly alongside companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon”.

Even if the British government eventually gives the deal its blessing, it still might not go ahead, says Gina Chon on Breakingviews. Thanks to complaints from Microsoft and Google, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also has the deal under “extended review” on competition grounds. An “unprecedented” semiconductor shortage is already causing the FTC review to go on for much longer than originally anticipated and giving it “more reason to hit pause”. The “global regulatory pile-on” means that Nvidia and Arm “must prepare for regulators to chip away further”.

Although Nvidia continues to maintain that it “can score the necessary government approvals to close the Arm deal”, its behaviour is making this harder, says Dan Gallagher in The Wall Street Journal. Last week Nvidia announced the launch of a new central processing unit, or CPU, called Grace. It is designed for use in data centres, which would effectively compete for the data-centre slots mostly occupied by chips from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). While the move boosted Nvidia’s share price, the fact that both Grace and the current offerings from AMD and Intel use Arm technology makes it easy to see how merging Nvidia and Arm could reduce competition.