Nvidia looking to buy Arm, in 'advanced talks'
UK-based chip designer Arm could change hands from its current SoftBank owner to Nvidia, Bloomberg reports, citing unnamed sources. The companies are in 'advanced talks' as per the insiders and a deal could be struck in the coming weeks.
Japanese SoftBank acquired Arm four years ago for $32 billion. Now, the amount Nvidia is expected to pay for it is estimated by market analysts at $55 billion.
The acquisition could be met with regulatory hurdles, however, as Nvidia is also currently a customer of Arm and rival customers like Apple, Qualcomm, AMD and Intel will require guarantees that they'll be given equal access to Arm's instruction set.
Arm designs chips for key industries, most notably smartphones, where virtually every CPU employs its designs. It's also expanding into smart cars, data centers, and networking equipment. Nvidia, meanwhile, is the world's largest graphics chipmaker with a market value of around $260 billion.