NVIDIA Is Supposedly Interested In Buying Arm

Tsing

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NVIDIA and Arm, sitting in a tree? Bloomberg is reporting that green team is mulling a potential acquisition of the world-renowned, UK-based semiconductor and software design company, whose owner, SoftBank Group Corp., had recently considered selling as part of a private deal or public stock listing.



“NVIDIA made an approach in recent weeks about a potential deal for Cambridge, England-based Arm, according to the people,” wrote Bloomberg. “Other potential bidders could also emerge, the people said, asking not to be identified because the information is private.”



Wait, could this actually happen? Who knows – NVIDIA had merely “expressed interest,”...
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Well Nvidia being worth more than Intel now kind of gives this credence.
 
I'm sure they aren't the only ones interested.
 
Uvilla said:
This would be a disaster.
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Yeah.

Even as much money as nVidia is worth, I'm not so sure even they could afford it. So not too worried about it.

The Japanese group bought Arm, which at the time was the U.K.’s largest listed technology company, for about $32 billion in 2016.
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So that is in 2016 dollars, and now Apple has announced they are shifting everything over to ARM, and the mobile market hasn't exactly imploded since... I'd say it's worth a great deal more than $32B today.

nVidia has a high market worth, but their revenue/assets aren't anywhere near that kind of number - they only have about $16B cash on hand ("only"). They would have to leverage out the yang to afford it.

Apple, on the other hand... $245B in cash setting around (in offshore accounts, I'm sure). Not that I think they would spring for it.... it wouldn't be their style to buy out something that a lot of other people have licenses... but they would be one of a select few that could actually pull off a buyout. Microsoft and Alphabet also have some pretty stacked war chests and could possibly pull off a buy out... I don't exactly see alphabet doing it, but I could see MS buying it out and totally wasting their investment. I don't see any of these companies actually putting in serious bids for ARM though - it doesn't really play to any of their core businesses of software and services.

I think the probable cases here are that ARM spins off as an IPO, or gets slurped up by another capital group. It's possible the patents could get parceled out and sold individually, and ARM would just kinda dissolve into irrelevancy.
 
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The reason for all this speculation is that Arm is strongly considering going public. The interest by others looking to acquire it will allow Arm (and the investment world) to hone in on a valuation for the IPO. Nvidia doesn’t have the resources to acquire Arm especially since they plunked down almost all of their cash for an AI firm just recently.
 
Yea and Dell didn't have the capital to buy EMC. But it still happened.
 
Grimlakin said:
Yea and Dell didn't have the capital to buy EMC. But it still happened.
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Well, they had backing from private equity. Also, Dell was in a worse position than Nvidia is today, which likely gave the PE firm greater leverage in the deal. Apple and Nvidia don’t get along, so this would be a stupid move on Nvidia’s part since Apple is going to be a major user of Arm for the foreseeable future. I don’t think too many PE firms want to potentially get on the wrong side of Apple by supporting Nvidia here, but you never know.
 
Nanobot said:
Well, they had backing from private equity. Also, Dell was in a worse position than Nvidia is today, which likely gave the PE firm greater leverage in the deal. Apple and Nvidia don’t get along, so this would be a stupid move on Nvidia’s part since Apple is going to be a major user of Arm for the foreseeable future. I don’t think too many PE firms want to potentially get on the wrong side of Apple by supporting Nvidia here, but you never know.
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Everyone is saying Apple is Going ARM. And they are... but please correct me if I am wrong here, but my understanding was that APPLE is going with their own proprietary ARM based chips. Is that correct? So Apple is making their own CPU's for their desktops and portable compute devices. They are not from the company ARM but from Apple themselves... right?
 
LeRoy_Blanchard said:
Yes that's correct, but they gotta pay royalties to ARM I do believe.
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Correct. Arm is the chip designer and so they work with, in this case Apple, to customize to their specifications. I was doing some research last night and Apple initially looked into acquiring Arm but quickly decided against it due to anti-trust concerns, as they would wind up selling Arm services to direct competitors. Also, an Nvidia acquisition doesn't look likely either because there is little to no crossover between the two firms. So, I stand with my original sentiment that the acquisition interests were really a barometer for SoftBank/Arm to see how much they should value the company for an IPO.
 
Nanobot said:
Correct. Arm is the chip designer and so they work with, in this case Apple, to customize to their specifications. I was doing some research last night and Apple initially looked into acquiring Arm but quickly decided against it due to anti-trust concerns, as they would wind up selling Arm services to direct competitors. Also, an Nvidia acquisition doesn't look likely either because there is little to no crossover between the two firms. So, I stand with my original sentiment that the acquisition interests were really a barometer for SoftBank/Arm to see how much they should value the company for an IPO.
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Yep, oddly just like Intel CPU's are based on AMD's x64 instruction set. ;)
 
Uvilla said:
This would be a disaster.
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Very likely yeah.

I e of the reasons ARM has been so successful is because of their relatively open, fair and no strings attached licensing process. Just pay the license, use the tech, including complete cores.

Nvidia isnt exact known for their open and friendly approach to things. Lock ins, exclusives, market manipulation, you name it. They are almost as bad as Intel at their worst.

I can only imagine the ways they will try to twist things to extract advantage if they wind up controlling ARM.

This is why I have been saying we need open source instruction sets. If everyone would just shift to RISC-V and leave the need for licensing in the past, that would be the best outcome for the industry. No one company can be allowed to have too much power, especially not Nvidia.
 
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