The European Commission has launched a formal investigation into NVIDIA's acquisition of chipmaker Arm. The deal, under which NVIDIA wants to acquire the UK tech company from SoftBank for $ 54 billion, was announced in September 2020.
In a press release, EU Vice President Margrethe Vestager said NVIDIA's purchase of Arm could make it difficult for other manufacturers to access Arm technology, damaging the entire semiconductor industry. At the heart of EU concerns is Arm's neutrality. The company licenses its chips to a wide variety of companies, including Apple, Samsung and Qualcomm, many of which compete with each other and with NVIDIA. There are fears that NVIDIA's control over Arm could put the “green” rivals at a disadvantage.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang says fears are misplaced and promises to continue supporting Arm's open technology licensing model. However, critics of the deal fear that NVIDIA will eventually begin to move away from such neutrality, and regulators will not be able to influence this.
The EU also plans to explore how the deal could affect how companies share information with Arm, and whether NVIDIA could change Arm's R&D funding model to make its products more profitable, to the detriment of companies that use other Arm technologies.
NVIDIA anticipated similar regulatory investigations and expects the deal could take up to 18 months to complete. It is worth noting that the EU is unlikely to be the only regulator to study the deal in detail. For example, back in August, the UK Competition and Market Administration announced plans to conduct its own investigation. In addition, US and Chinese regulators may be looking into the deal, according to the available data.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Your comment and facebook share will be appreciated