Washington The US government wants to prevent a billion dollar deal for the chip designer arm, whose technology is in practically all smartphones. The planned takeover of the British company by the graphics card specialist Nvidia could slow down innovations, the trade authority FTC justified its complaint on Thursday. The US company Nvidia had already planned to purchase Arm, which would cost around $ 40 billion, in September 2020. The business is being scrutinized in Europe, among other places. It would be the largest acquisition in the semiconductor industry.
The basic architecture of the chips, which are used in almost all smartphones and most tablet computers, comes from Arm. Based on the arm designs, Apple and Samsung, among others, develop the processors for their smartphones. The chip company Qualcomm, whose chips are in many Android phones, also uses it.
The arm architectures prevailed in smartphones against chip systems from the semiconductor giant Intel – among other things because they are significantly more energy-efficient. Chips based on arm designs are now also being used in data centers – and Apple is using them in its new Mac computers.
Arm is currently owned by the Japanese technology group Softbank, which did not shake the British company’s independence. In view of the planned takeover by Nvidia, however, there was already unrest in the technology industry. Some Arm customers feared that the graphics card specialist might be interested in better interlinking future Arm architectures with their own products – which would worsen their competitive position. Nvidia rejected such fears.
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The FTC’s concerns are now moving in the same direction. The deal would allow Nvidia to unfairly disadvantage competitors, the agency argued. She sees the danger, among other things, with assistance systems in cars and processors for cloud services. The purchase of Arm will also give Nvidia access to confidential information from some of its competitors who are also customers of the chip designer.
Nvidia last announced in mid-November that it was in talks with the FTC about how the authority’s concerns about the deal could be allayed. Softbank is also massively promoting the deal. Because for the technology investor, failure would be another setback. Softbank posted heavy losses in the past quarter due to the slide in tech stocks in China. The share price has therefore fallen by 22 percent since mid-November. The new negative news briefly drove it down another 1.8 percent to 5,500 yen at the start of the Tokyo stock market, and then rose again slightly.
More: Share price soaring: That makes Nvidia better than the competition