The CEO of NVIDIA, Jen-Hsun Huang, had been very positive about the possible closing of the purchase of ARM sometime in 2022, but this operation continues to generate many doubts, and it seems that the United Kingdom is not at all clear about it, since it has finally decided to intervene citing issues of public interest and national security.
The UK Competition and Markets Authority has taken this decision taking into account the opinions of experts in the field, as indicated in a very terse, but quite clear official statement, which highlights that there are many detractors of the purchase of ARM by NVIDIA.
We could go through a long list of reasons why this operation generates so much rejection, but the most important thing is that, in the end, it all boils down to one idea: the monopoly that the ARM architecture has in key sectors, and the position in which a giant like NVIDIA could be left after taking over ARM. For the UK, the consequences are “unpredictable” and an in-depth assessment is needed, which will lead to an official report. This report will be produced in the coming months and should be in the hands of the Secretary of State by July 30.
NVIDIA has been using the ARM architecture in many of its products, from the Tegra series to the NVIDIA Jetson solutions. The green giant’s commitment to ARM architecture was also recently confirmed in Grace, a solution designed to be at its best in servers, data centers, and systems dedicated to artificial intelligence.
The great importance of ARM for NVIDIA, and many giants operating in numerous technology sectors, including Apple, Huawei, Samsung, and many others, is what generates so many to the UK competition regulator. The UK competition watchdog fears that NVIDIA, when it completes its purchase of ARM, could put in place anti-competitive restraints that would make it difficult, or impossible, for these giants to access the licenses needed to develop ARM-based chips.
Jen-Hsun Huang has previously said that they do not intend to engage in this type of “malpractice”, and gave us an example of NVIDIA’s good work its collaborations with Amazon, Marvel, and MediaTek. we remind you, before finishing, that even if this purchase operation manages to overcome the UK investigation, it could still run into another major stumbling block, China.
