SoftBank is allegedly making the necessary arrangements to sell off ARM to NVIDIA. According to a WSJ report, both parties seem to have finally reached an agreement, with the banking conglomerate willing to let go of its ownership of the British chipmaker to the GPU maker for a tidy sum of US$40 billion (~RM166 billion).
Word about the deal first broke back in July, but it was only in August that word about NVIDIA being ARM’s next owner began to coalesce. Softbank purchased ARM back in 2016 to the tune of US$31 billion (~RM131 billion). Unfortunately, a series of losses and a lower-than-projected profit by the chipmaker has led the bank to rethink its ownership.
NVIDIA’s acquisition of ARM isn’t without its own set of questions; ARM is a company that produces chips mainly for companies within the mobile space, and can count AMD, Apple, Samsung, and Qualcomm among its list of clients. The last we checked, NVIDIA ended its affair with mobile chipsets years ago, the only exception being Tegra X1 and X2 chipsets. That currently power the Nintendo Switch consoles.
On a related note, NVIDIA’s purchase of ARM could also be a signal that the GPU maker is ready to make a comeback into that space, and acquiring the chipmaker is simply a part of its grand scheme. Guess we’ll have to wait and see.
