SoftBank is reportedly planning to sell chipmaker ARM to Nvidia by next week in a deal worth more than $40 billion, reports The Wall Street Journal. If the deal gets confirmed it would be one of the largest ever in the chip sector and would likely face intense regulatory scrutiny. According to the WSJ, the companies have been in exclusive talks for weeks.
SoftBank bought ARM in 2016 for $31 billion. The British company’s chips power mobile device processors for companies including Apple, Samsung, and Qualcomm.
ARM has likely only increased in value since the SoftBank acquisition, with Microsoft making an ARM-based Surface and a version of Windows for ARM, and Apple planning to switch future Macs to ARM-based chipsets.
Now Nvidia is the leading maker of GPUs, which ARM also designs, but other than its Tegra line of mobile chipsets used in devices like the Nintendo Switch, Nvidia doesn’t do much in the way of CPU design or mobile hardware. An ARM acquisition is likely to change that.
Now we don’t know what are Nvidia plans for the company but we sure can say that the acquisition will bring something interesting very soon.
