NVIDIA Won’t Be Buying ARM, And Everyone Is Happy About It

At any given moment, large companies are making deals to purchase other companies. Since 2020, NVIDIA has been wanting to buy ARM, but it’s been facing some pushback from multiple parties. Now, according to Bloomberg, the deal to buy ARM has fallen through.

NVIDIA will not be buying ARM

NVIDIA buying ARM would have been a BIG deal in the computing world. We know NVIDIA as a major chip manufacturer. It’s really big in the GPU department, being the company behind the RTX series of GPUs. ARM is also a major chip manufacturer. It provides the chip architecture for Qualcomm, Google, Samsung, Huawei, MediaTek, Apple, and thousands more companies. If you own a Nintendo 3DS or a PS Vita, guess what, you’re using ARM chips.

NVIDIA has been eyeing ARM for a while; at least since 2020. The company was looking to spend an estimated $40 billion to acquire ARM which would have been the biggest acquisition in the chip market in history. According to an anonymous source close to the matter, the company doesn’t expect that the deal will go through.

Instead of selling the company off to NVIDIA, SoftBank, the company that currently owns ARM, will be making an initial public offering for potential buyers. This means that we could see other companies that are interested in buying ARM.

The deal fell through, and that’s a good thing

So, NVIDIA won’t be buying ARM, and that’s most likely for the best. It won’t be good for one company to have that much control over the chip market. In a similar vein, Microsoft just bought Activision Blizzard, and that means that Microsoft has a lot of control over the gaming market.

SoftBank isn’t a chip company, so no one really batted an eye when it bought ARM, but NVIDIA is a chip company. This means that the company would have control over a LARGE part of the mobile chip market. That would give NVIDIA the ability to manipulate the market however it sees fit. No company should have that much power over such an essential market.

Even the US Federal Trade Commission wanted to put a stop to this. It sued NVIDIA stating that it would become too powerful. Back before SoftBank bought ARM, much the same controversy happened. Apple was looking to buy ARM back when it was up for sale. That upset a lot of people because no one wanted Apple to have that sort of control over the mobile chip market.