NVIDIA officially acquires Arm for $40 billion in bid for AI dominance
Chip designers at Arm have new owners under growing juggernaut NVIDIA.
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What you need to know
Asexpected, popular GPU and server provider NVIDIA is taking over SoftBank Group Corp. (SBG) ’s share of Arm Limited. The deal’s price is valued at $40 billion and was officiallyannounced by NVIDIAon late Sunday night. In turn, Softbank gets a 10 percent stake in NVIDIA and is “committed to Arm’s long-term success.”
In the full press statement, NVIDIA cited multiple ways for the company to leverage Arm’s research and development (R&D) and chip designs to accelerate its plans for artificial intelligence (A.I.) and modern computing solutions for enterprise and consumers.
Details in the announcement were highlighted as follows:
Arm will also remain in Cambridge, UK, for the foreseeable future:
Arm will remain headquartered in Cambridge. We will expand on this great site and build a world-class AI research facility, supporting developments in healthcare, life sciences, robotics, self-driving cars and other fields. And, to attract researchers and scientists from the U.K. and around the world to conduct groundbreaking work, NVIDIA will build a state-of-the-art AI supercomputer, powered by Arm CPUs. Arm Cambridge will be a world-class technology center.
Arm Holdings is separate from companies like Qualcomm, Apple, Texas Instruments, Broadcom, and NVIDIA. The former company designs and licenses chips, while the latter companies build off those platforms through customization and addons, while also manufacturing them (called ARM with caps). It will be curious to see if this deal with NVIDIA affects the long-term market for the various companies, but the whole point of Arm Holdingsislicensing of the IP as the business model. Therecould be some downsides too, however.
NVIDIA has quite a year with stock rallying more than 100 percent, and up over 40 percent from just May. While many know NVIDIA for its gaming GPUs, the company is very diversified with leading performance in various segments, including AI, machine learning, data centers, and self-driving cars.
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Daniel Rubino is the Editor-in-chief of Windows Central. He is also the head reviewer,podcast co-host, and analyst. He has been covering Microsoft since 2007, when this site was called WMExperts (and later Windows Phone Central). His interests include Windows, laptops, next-gen computing, and watches. He has been reviewing laptops since 2015 and is particularly fond of 2-in-1 convertibles, ARM processors, new form factors, and thin-and-light PCs. Before all this tech stuff, he worked on a Ph.D. in linguistics, watched people sleep (for medical purposes!), and ran the projectors at movie theaters because it was fun.
