FTC sues to block Nvidia’s $40 billion acquisition of Arm

Back in September 2020, NVIDIA announced that it would buy Arm from SoftBank for $40 billion. Since then, the deal has come under scrutiny from government agencies around the world. Last night, the FTC sued to block the acquisition. The FTC feels that this proposed vertical agreement would allow NVIDIA to control the design and computing technology that rival companies rely on to develop their own competing chips. The FTC alleges that the proposed NVIDIA-ARM would have the means and incentives to limit competition in the following three global markets.

• Advanced Advanced Driver Assistance System for passenger cars. These systems provide computer-assisted driving functions, such as automatic lane change, lane keeping, motorway access and collision prevention;
• DPU SmartNIC, which are advanced networking products used to increase the security and efficiency of data center servers; and
• CPU-based arm for cloud service providers. These new and emerging products leverage Arm’s technology to meet the performance, energy efficiency, and customizability needs of modern cloud-powered data centers. “Cloud computing” refers to an increasingly popular computing business model in which large data center operators provide remote computing services and/or directly provide computing resources to lease, as well as provide other support services to customers, who can then run applications, host websites, or perform other computing tasks on a remote server — that is, “the cloud.” “.

Holly Vedova, Director of the FTC Competition Bureau, said: “The FTC is suing to block the largest semiconductor chip merger in history to prevent a chip corporation from obstructing the innovation path for companies. next generation technology. “The technologies of tomorrow depend on sustaining today’s competitive, advanced chip markets. The proposed deal would skew Arm’s incentives in the chip market and allow the company to combine unfairly weaken Nvidia’s competitors. The FTC lawsuit sends a strong signal that we will act aggressively to protect our critical infrastructure markets from far-reaching illegal vertical mergers and to the detriment of future innovations. ”

The source: FTC