Ever since Nvidia announced the acquisition of ARM, the deal has been facing lots of obstacles and now it has run into another massive hurdle. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has announced that it is suing to block the merger from going through.
The commission is concerned that the combined entity would “stifle competing next-generation technologies.” The lawsuit comes after FTC investigated the deal after receiving complaints from Google, Microsoft, and Qualcomm.
In a statement, FTC Bureau of Competition Director Holly Vedova said: “The FTC is suing to block the largest semiconductor chip merger in history to prevent a chip conglomerate from stifling the innovation pipeline for next-generation technologies. This proposed deal would distort Arm’s incentives in chip markets and allow the combined firm to unfairly undermine Nvidia’s rivals.”
Responding to the news, Nvidia spokesperson said: “As we move into this next step in the FTC process, we will continue to work to demonstrate that this transaction will benefit the industry and promote competition.”
The FTC notes that Nvidia already uses Arm-based products for several areas, including high-level advanced driver systems for vehicles, CPUs for cloud computing, and DPU SmartNICs. By acquiring Arm, Nvidia would gain an unfair advantage in those markets.
It has also raised concerns that Nvidia would gain access to sensitive information from Arm licensees who already compete with Nvidia, in addition to de-incentivizing Arm from working on new products and designs that would conflict with Nvidia’s own interests.
Nvidia has promised that it would keep Arm’s existing open licensing model to provide semiconductor designs to companies, including Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung, Amazon, and more. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that the company has no intention to ‘throttle’ or ‘deny’ Arm’s supply to any customer.
Apart from FTC, the European Union has also opened a formal investigation into the deal while the UK’s Competition and Market Authority is looking more in-depth for the potential national security risks and competition concerns.
For the uninitiated, Nvidia announced its plans to acquire the UK-based Arm from SoftBank in September 2020 in a deal that is valued at $40 billion. The deal has faced criticism from both international regulators and industry heavyweights.
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