Nvidia Purchases Arm For $40 Billion

[Update: Nvidia might be relin­quish­ing their offer for Arm due to the FTC.]

After announc­ing its next series of graph­ics cards, Nvidia has made anoth­er major announce­ment. The com­pa­ny is pur­chas­ing the British semi­con­duc­tor com­pa­ny, Arm, for $40 bil­lion. Nvidia acquired Arm from Soft­Bank, which paid $31 bil­lion for it back in 2016.

In a state­ment released by Nvidia, the com­pa­ny said buy­ing Arm will help them become the “pre­mier com­put­ing com­pa­ny for the age of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, accel­er­at­ing inno­va­tion while expand­ing into large, high-growth markets.”

Although Soft­Bank has sold Arm, they are also tak­ing an own­er­ship stake in Nvidia which will be “under 10 percent.”

AI is the most pow­er­ful tech­nol­o­gy force of our time and has launched a new wave of com­put­ing,” Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said. “In the years ahead, tril­lions of com­put­ers run­ning AI will cre­ate a new inter­net-of-things that is thou­sands of times larg­er than today’s inter­net-of-peo­ple. Our com­bi­na­tion will cre­ate a com­pa­ny fab­u­lous­ly posi­tioned for the age of AI.”

The team at Arm will stay at their cur­rent head­quar­ters in Cam­bridge, but with the new invest­ment, it will be expand­ed. Offices and a “world-class AI research facil­i­ty” will be built to sup­port the devel­op­ment of new tech­nol­o­gy for health care, life sci­ences, robot­ics, and self-dri­ving cars. Arm also plans to build a “state-of-the-art AI super­com­put­er” that uses Arm CPUs.

“Arm and Nvidia share a vision and pas­sion that ubiq­ui­tous, ener­gy-effi­cient com­put­ing will help address the world’s most press­ing issues from cli­mate change to health­care, from agri­cul­ture to edu­ca­tion,” Arm CEO Simon Segars said in a state­ment. “Deliv­er­ing on this vision requires new approach­es to hard­ware and soft­ware and a long-term com­mit­ment to research and devel­op­ment. By bring­ing togeth­er the tech­ni­cal strengths of our two com­pa­nies we can accel­er­ate our progress and cre­ate new solu­tions that will enable a glob­al ecosys­tem of inno­va­tors. My man­age­ment team and I are excit­ed to be join­ing Nvidia so we can write this next chap­ter together.”