NVIDIA's $40bn acquisition of the Cambridge-based chip designer Arm has come under further pressure following concerns raised by a plethora of tech companies, including Google and Microsoft.
This comes as the NVIDIA-Arm deal is facing reviews from various anti-trust regulators, including those in the US, UK, China and EU.
For all the latest on whether this deal will go through, or if Arm will remain owned by SoftBank, keep reading...
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Why is the NVIDIA-Arm deal objected?
As reported by Bloomberg, Google's parent company Alphabet and Microsoft have raised concerns about the $40bn deal amid suspicion that the acquisition could impact their supply of chip technology.
Arm supplies its chips to a variety of tech companies including Apple, Intel, Amazon, Huawei and Qualcomm. If NVIDIA was to purchase Arm, some in these companies are worries that NVIDIA would raise the price or restrict access to its rivals, especially given the high price NVIDIA will pay for Arm.
NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Huang previously rejected these concerns of controlling Arm's deals with its rivals, telling the Financial Timesthat he could "unequivocally state that Nvidia will maintain Arm’s open licensing model."
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Will the NVIDIA-Arm deal go through?
NVIDIA's acquisition of Arm now faces a lengthy review process in the UK, US, EU and China, and with the sizeable amount of companies opposed to the deal, it could make this process pretty difficult.
The UK and EU investigators told Financial Times they would "thoroughly investigate", while the Federal Trade Commission has also allegedly begun an in-depth investigation into the acquisition, with Biden's new acting head of the FTC previously writing "Moving forward, we need to aggressively enforce against the harms of vertical mergers" - the same type of merger as the NVIDIA-Arm deal.
A spokesperson for NVIDIA said: "'We're confident that both regulators and customers will see the benefits of our plan to continue Arm's open licensing model and ensure a transparent, collaborative relationship with Arm's licensees."
As of now, it doesn't seem like the NVIDIA-Arm deal is dead, but it certainly faces a long, drawn-out process with anti-trust regulators.
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