NVIDIA Confirms US$40 Billion ARM Acquisition From SoftBank
by John LawNVIDIA has confirmed that it has come to an agreement with the SoftBank Group (SoftBank) for its acquisition of ARM. As per our earlier report, the GPU brand agreed to pay the Japanese banking group US$40 billion (~RM166 billion) for the Cambridge-based chipmaker.
According to the official newsletter, the payment to Softbank will be transacted through a “combination of its shares and cash”. As to what NVIDIA plans on doing with the assets of its newest acquisition, the brand says that it will be using ARM chips to the drive its AI endeavours further. To that end, it also announced that it will be “expanding ARM’s R&D presence” by building a new supercomputer within its the chipmaker’s home of Cambridge.
As for ARM’s already existing customer base – the company counts AMD, Apple, Samsung, and Google as some of the biggest patrons of its products – NVIDIA says that it will not put a stop of it and will continue with ARM’s open-licensing model and customer neutrality. The only difference here, really, is that the chips will simply have NVIDIA’s branding on them from now onwards.
On that note, it’s pretty unlikely that NVIDIA is planning on getting back into the mobile chipset game. At least, that’s how things look from this side of the pond. Still, one can hope, and we do hope that we’re proven wrong in that aspect.
(Source: NVIDIA)