Setback for Nvidia's $54 Billion ARM Bid as EU Regulators Open Probe (reuters.com) 21
Nvidia suffered a setback on Wednesday as EU antitrust regulators opened a full-scale investigation into its $54 billion bid for British chip designer ARM on concerns the deal could lead to higher prices, less choice and reduced innovation. From a report: Britain's competition agency is also probing the deal for the country's most important technology company, warning that it could damage competition and weaken rivals. Reuters reported the European Commission viewed as insufficient concessions offered by the world's biggest maker of graphics and artificial intelligence (AI) chips during its preliminary review. Nvidia has not disclosed what these are but it has previously said it would maintain ARM as a neutral technology supplier to sooth concerns from customers such as Qualcomm, Samsung and Apple. The Commission said it would decide by March 15 whether to clear or block the deal. "Whilst Arm and Nvidia do not directly compete, Arm's IP is an important input in products competing with those of Nvidia, for example in datacentres, automotive and in Internet of Things," EU competition chief Margrethe Vestager said in a statement.
It's just a question of money. As in: (Score:2)
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Re: It's just a question of money. As in: (Score:3)
Bribes aren't a great option. It's better to marry an MEP and gave them plainly put your interests ahead of the electorate. Janelly Fourtou Is a good example of this, married to then CEO of Vivendi Universal and never missing an opportunity to push for ever stricter IP laws.
Get Lost Nvidia (Score:1)
We don't want you here.
How Is the EU Involved? (Score:2)
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The EU has a say by nature of NVIDIA and ARM both being commercially active in the European single market. It's likely that if the merger is approved, there will be limitations on the kind of tight-bundling that can be done between the ARM CPU and NVIDIA GPU cores, e.g. by mandating an open interconnect in which other GPU IP can be dropped in without NVIDIA being given an unfair competitive advantage. This is especially prudent as neither company actually makes anything, both are fabless and only license IP
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ARM Ltd. has some operations in the EU. For example they have a CPU design center in France.
Total Annihilation (Score:2)
Nvidia suffered a setback on Wednesday as EU antitrust regulators opened a full-scale investigation into its $54 billion bid for British chip designer ARM . .. concessions offered by the world's biggest maker of ... artificial intelligence (AI) chips during its preliminary review. Nvidia has not disclosed what these are but it has previously said it would maintain ARM as a neutral technology supplier to sooth concerns from customers such as Qualcomm, Samsung and Apple
"The Core and the Arm have all but exhausted the resources of a galaxy in their struggle for domination. Both sides now crippled beyond repair, the remnants of their armies continue to battle on ravaged planets, their hatred fueled by over four thousand years of total war. This is a fight to the death. [youtu.be]
For each side, the only acceptable outcome is the complete elimination of the other."
Mergers are a tool of greed (Score:3, Insightful)
The only reason a "merger" is done is to expand a company's reach, usually to help crush competition (big gobbling up smaller ones - hardly ever hear of it the other way around) in order to increase profits, usually for their real customers (read: shareholders). All other excuses given for any merger are irrelevant in the end.
Fuck Nvidia (Score:2)
Love their cards, but they're halting production to help keep video card prices artificially high. So fuck 'em. Wish AMD cards were as good.
https://www.hardwaretimes.com/nvidia-reportedly-halts-production-of-nvidia-rtx-30-series-gpu-to-avoid-price-plummet/
$54 billion (Score:3)
For fucks sake nVidia, why not instead give 100 million dollars in cash to the top 500 CPU designers in the world and get them to design you something superior or at least equal to the ARM architecture? You would even have 4 billion leftover to spend on beer, pizza, and hookers. Alternatively you could give 10 million to the top 5400 cpu designers. That is around the same as the total number of ARM employees including janitorial staff.
Better to have a constortium (Score:5, Interesting)
For something like ARM, I would rather see any purchase done by a consortium of companies. In doing so, these companies should be limited on how much of ARM they can own. This would be to prevent a single company, such as Nvidia, being in a position to bring down ARM or to be in a position of being anti-competition. Then again anything Nvidia does to hurt ARM would likely be an advantage for Intel and RISC-V.
Maybe Apple could buy back the 20% of ARM they once had?
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Why allow ARM to be sold at all? Keeping ARM independent seems to be the best option. It's profitable, there is no shortage of cash, and companies that want to work with them can always contract to do so.
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Why allow ARM to be sold at all? Keeping ARM independent seems to be the best option. It's profitable, there is no shortage of cash, and companies that want to work with them can always contract to do so.
Right now, ARM is owned by SoftBank and this all started because SoftBank was looking to sell ARM. A future buyer should not be in a position of a conflict of interest, which Nvidia is currently. A consortium or single entity that is not linked to chip making or design would be seen as the better next owners.
There is hope⦠(Score:2)
That not all politicians are corrupt and block this.
Nvidia is not a team player. They have burned everyone that dared working with them (donâ(TM)t worry nintendo, your time will come).
Then they surely love pushing lock-in techs that severely limits the industry.
They have some really nefarious plans to pay that much money for a company that produces around 4 billions bucks a year. It simply makes no financial sense, especially when for a lot less, they can obtain a proper license and some smart people t