Editorial

Nvidia-Arm deal will never happen

Paul van Gerven
Reading time: 3 minutes

Arm being owned by Nvidia is like TSMC designing its own smartphone chips. It will never happen.

While many investors and analysts applaud the Nvidia’s ballsy move to purchase Arm, one of the chip design company’s co-founders most definitely does not. “The sale of Arm to Nvidia will destroy the very basis of Arm’s business model, which is to be the Switzerland of the semiconductor industry, dealing in an even-handed way with its over 500 licensees. Most of them are Nvidia’s competitors,” writes Hermann Hauser in an open letter to UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

In a press conference, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Arm CEO Simon Segars took great pains to assure that Arm’s business model would remain intact, continuing the open-licensing model and maintaining customer neutrality. Hauser dismisses these promises outright. “The value of that is not worth the value of the piece of paper it’s written on, unless it’s legally binding,” he told Sky News. “Of course Nvidia will say this at the moment, but I think there’s absolutely no reason to believe that they’ll keep that promise long-term.”

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