The European Commission has launched a formal competition investigation into NVIDIA’s acquisition of chip designer ARM. The transaction will allow NVIDIA to acquire the British company from SoftBank for $40 billion. The transaction was announced as early as September 2020.EU Executive Vice President Margaret Vestag said in a press release that NVIDIA’s acquisition of ARM may make it more difficult for other manufacturers to obtain ARM’s technology and damage most of the semiconductor industry (which is already facing very embarrassing supply problem).
The core concern is the neutrality of ARM. ARM licenses its chip designs to a wide range of companies, includingApple,SamsungAnd Qualcomm, many of which compete with NVIDIA, and there are concerns that NVIDIA’s control of ARM may put NVIDIA’s competitors at a disadvantage.
“Regulators do not believe that NVIDIA will keep ARM’s open statement”
The Financial Times reported in February that NVIDIA’s CEO Huang Renxun stated that the above concerns will not occur and promised to maintain ARM’s open licensing model, but critics of the transaction worry that regulators will not be able to force NVIDIA to maintain indefinitely. neutral.
According to the EU press release, NVIDIA has submitted commitments to try to resolve some of these issues, but the committee believes that these commitments are “not enough to explicitly dismiss its serious doubts about the effectiveness of the transaction.”
The EU also plans to investigate how the transaction affects the sharing of information between competitors and ARM, and whether NVIDIA will change ARM’s research and development funding to make its products more profitable, thereby harming companies that use ARM’s other technologies.
Both NVIDIA and ARM are looking forward to such a regulatory investigation and expect that the transaction may take 18 months to complete. The EU investigation is unlikely to be the only regulatory review facing the transaction. The UK Competition and Markets Authority recommended that it conduct its own in-depth investigation in August after asking a third party to comment on the merger. According to the “Financial Times” report, US and Chinese regulators may also conduct formal reviews of the transaction. In addition, the UK is also investigating the potential national security impact of the acquisition.
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