LONDON – NVIDIA announced Sunday that it had come to an agreement to buy UK chip-designer Arm from Softbank. The transaction is worth a total of $40 billion.
Arm Bought by NVIDIA but Staying in UK
Arm chipsets are already used in iPhone and iPads. Apple will also use Arm-chips in Apple Silicon Macs. The company will remain headquartered in Cambridge, UK, according to NVIDIA Co-founder CEO Jensen Huang. “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,” he said. “This combination has tremendous benefits for both companies, our customers, and the industry. For Arm’s ecosystem, the combination will turbocharge Arm’s R&D capacity and expand its IP portfolio with NVIDIA’s world-leading GPU and AI technology.”
Concerns Raised About Purchase
However, not everyone was happy with the deal. Techcrunch reported that Arm co-founder Hermann Hauser has lauched a ‘Save Arm’ campaign. Indeed, he has written an open letter to UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson in which he described himself as “extremely concerned” by the sale. He proposed that “the natural alternative to an Arm sale to Nvidia is to take Arm public on the London Stock Exchange and make it a British owned company again with a Golden Share for national economic security.”