UK regulators to conduct ‘in-depth’ investigation into Nvidia’s Arm acquisition

Back in April, the UK began looking into Nvidia's proposed $40 billion acquisition of ARM, a company based in the UK but currently owned by Japanese firm, SoftBank. After a preliminary investigation, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) concluded that the deal “could create problems“, and now, a larger investigation is underway. 

The UK's Digital Secretary, Nadine Dorries, has now instructed the CMA to carry out an “in-depth Phase Two investigation of the proposed acquisition of Arm by Nvidia on competition and national security grounds”.

The in-depth investigation is scheduled to take place over the next six months. At the same time, regulators in China and the European Union are also continuing to investigate the deal and have yet to approve. Recently, Nvidia admitted that the deal is “taking longer than expected” to close, but remains confident that everything should go through before the end of 2022.

This acquisition of Arm has gone through plenty of scrutiny since being announced in Q3 2020. This is in large part due to the fact that Arm licenses its technology openly to other major companies like Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung and more. Nvidia has stated that it would maintain Arm's open licensing model, but there is still concern around fair competition in a world where Arm is under Nvidia's control.

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KitGuru Says: Nvidia's planned acquisition of Arm still has a lot of hurdles to clear. Do you think the acquisition will eventually be approved? 

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