The wedding will not take place: after rumors from the corridors last January that Nvidia was throwing in the towel for the takeover of ARM, SoftBank formalizes the failure of the procedure.
The Japanese investment group SoftBank, which was delighted to make a tumble of more than eight billion by reselling ARM for 40 billion dollars to Nvidia officially canceled the sale when announcing its latest financial results, this morning February 8 2022.
The reasons given are obviously the numerous investigations and blockages by the various competition authorities. Last December the American FTC had blocked the operation, the United Kingdom and the European Union are in full investigation, and the Chinese authorities have still not validated the deal announced at the end of 2020. Clearly, it did not smell the scorched, the deal was literally on fire.
SoftBank, which wanted to sell ARM to recover some money following a few failed investments, will therefore have to settle for an IPO.
“ARM is becoming a hub of innovation, not just in the mobile revolution, but also in the cloud, automotive, Internet of Things, and the metaverse. He entered a second growth sentenceexplained Masayoshi Son, boss of Softbank Group, in a press release.
We will take this chance and start preparing for ARM’s IPO, and make even more progress.”
This “IPO” in the jargon (initial public offering) should take place before March 2023, i.e. the end of the 2022 fiscal year for the Japanese group. To carry out this new project, which Softbank already calls “largest IPO in semiconductor history”, the Japanese giant has appointed a new CEO. He will be in charge of managing the end of “non-marriage” with Nvidia and preparing the financial files. A file that will start with good figures, since between April and December 2021, ARM’s intellectual property sales jumped by 40%.
Read also: What Nvidia’s failed ARM takeover will change
It was somehow this success of ARM instruction sets that prevented the sale to Nvidia. With an ever-increasing demand for ARM chip “plans” in all areas (automotive, telecom, IT, home automation, etc.), leaving such a strategic technology to a non-neutral player put a lot of business at risk. Including those from Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm and others.
As reminded Reuters, this is not the only failure to bring together two chip giants: former President Trump prevented Broadcom (Sino-American) from buying Qualcomm (American) in 2017/2018. The Chinese authorities had, in retaliation, blocked the takeover of NXP (Dutch) by Qualcomm a few months later.
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As industries and governments (re)discover the strategic nature of semiconductors, super-deals will, more than ever, be scrutinized by the various regulators. A chance for RISC-V?
Source: SoftBank press release, Reuters