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Nvidia's $40 Billion Arm Deal Faces Tougher Antitrust Hurdle (bloomberg.com) 19

Nvidia's planned $40 billion takeover of chipmaker Arm should get a longer antitrust probe, British regulators warned after rejecting potential concessions. From a report: In the first reaction on the deal from a major antitrust watchdog, the Competition and Markets Authority said in a statement that it was concerned the deal would give Nvidia too much control over semiconductors used in data center services, smart devices and gaming consoles. Lengthy regulatory reviews can add risk to closing a deal that looks set to overshoot Nvidia's initial target to close in March 2022. Nvidia hasn't yet filed for European Union approval, where an extended review takes at least five months.

Nvidia's move to buy Arm from Japan's SoftBank Group Corp. initially raised antitrust concerns from rivals and customers such as Qualcomm and Alphabet's Google over how Nvidia might control Arm's licenses for essential chip technology. U.K. Digital Secretary Oliver Dowden must still decide whether the CMA should open an in-depth probe. Dowden is also separately weighing whether the deal should be blocked over potential risks to national security. The U.K. is leaning toward a veto, according to a person familiar with the matter earlier this month.

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Nvidia's $40 Billion Arm Deal Faces Tougher Antitrust Hurdle

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  • Just like the T-Mobile merger did. With that much money they can grease as many palms as they need to and nobody really cares about antitrust because nobody understands it. Or at least not enough people to change how people vote and who gets elected.

    Not sure what to do about the cult of the corporation we've got going on across the world. People are terrified of raining in Wall Street elites because the job creators might take the ball and go home. And if you suggest taking the ball away from them they
    • ARM represents something special for UK. It's their most well known technology brand and is relevant to the entire world.

      Sure, they let it go to Softbank, but a few things were different:
      -That happened right around the very first vote for exiting the EU, and was probably settled before the more hard core nationalist sentiment really took hold. Now that they have exited the EU, there's both the nationalist sentiment and a bit more need to hold on to things in a world where they have isolated themselves a bi

      • Nancy Pelosi just bought a bunch of shares, and a lot of options in Nvidia. It is going to go through.
        • by Junta ( 36770 )

          The US was never going to blink at nVidia acquiring ARM. So discussions about Palosi's activity in this area are sort of moot because the UK is the government that is the one that is reluctant.

          • by HiThere ( 15173 )

            Well, the UK is the government questioning at the moment, but it sounds like the EU hasn't committed to approving it either.

  • Consolidation of tech firms and large enterprises has really gone on unabated for the last 40 years, especially the last 20. Feels like regulators don't want to stop deals since so many large ones have already been allowed to happen but they really should draw a line in the sand here.

    ARM is probably the first tech company I would say should be "nationalized" or Softbank should sell to a company that doesn't already produce ARM chips. It's too important to too many industries to be controlled by one compan

  • Is it still news when the same editor 'reported' the same thing 25 hours ago?

    https://slashdot.org/story/21/08/19/1216217/nvidia-admits-acquisition-of-british-chip-designer-arm-may-take-longer-than-18-months/ [slashdot.org]

    • These two are technically linked to different articles a day apart with different headlines. But essentially the same for anyone that bothered to RTFA.

  • While Nvidia refuse to release open source drivers for their GPU's so we can check functionality they will always be suspect.

  • block it already!

    Nvidia has zero intentions in helping the industry.

    If you think that Qualcomm is bad for the mobile industry, wait for the hell on earth that it will become if nvidia is allowed to purchase ARM.

    They simply dont know or worse, dont care in how to work well with others.

    Every single partner that did the mistake of working with nvidia got burned.

    Yes, Nintendo will also get burned...

  • Nvidia has a reputation of not supporting opensource and are very arrogant. Their latest cards have no driver support on Mac. Even Linux has limited support. Plus they add things like the "reset bug" in their firmware to artificially limit what users can do with their products. I can't see this being of benefit to anyone but the greedy executives at Nvidia
  • The deal looks set to overshoot Nvidia's initial target to close in March 2022. Nvidia hasn't yet filed for European Union approval, where an extended review takes at least five months. I wonder if Nvidia is having second thoughts on all the shit that the deal is raising and is looking for a face saving way to back out.
  • RISCV
    • To me Risc-V needs a champion if its going to be anything more than an embedded chip to take on Cortex A.

      HiFive Unmatched is promising but few will pay upwards of $US600.

      I'd be interested to see what Intel can bring to the table in terms of economies of scale with their Horse Creek platform. Given they struggle to make a fanless Celeron without a massive heatsink, perhaps they'd have better luck producing a Risc-V single board computer - or re-enter the smartphone market paired with their 5G modems.

  • "National Security" arguments my ass. *China's Softbank* is fine, but nvidia is a risk? Get real.

    Significant chance of anti-competitive / monopolistic practices? Sure. But this? This is 100% a politician just holding out his hand like a bellboy. (Doubtless while buying / shorting the stocks involved along the way).

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