It is rumored that Nvidia is ready to abandon the acquisition of Arm and still needs to pay $1.25 billion to SoftBank

Nvidia may not have imagined that the acquisition of Arm would be so cumbersome, and it would be too difficult to pass the scrutiny of regulators in various countries. In particular, at the end of last year, after review and evaluation, the US Federal Trade Commission believed that Nvidia had the means and motivation to "stifle the next generation of innovative technologies" after acquiring Arm, and damaged the competition in the global market in terms of intelligent driving assistance systems, data processing centers and Smart NICs, as well as Arm processor-based cloud computing services, giving Nvidia a heavy blow.

At the time, the director of the COMPETITION Bureau of the U.S. Trade Commission said in a statement:

"Tomorrow's technology depends on sustaining today's competition. The deal would distort ARM's momentum on the chip market and allow the acquired company to unfairly weaken NVIDIA's competitors. The FTC's prosecution will be a strong signal that we will take positive action to protect critical infrastructure markets from illegal vertical mergers, as well as disruptive impacts on future innovations. ”

According to Wccftech, sources said that Nvidia is quietly preparing to abandon the acquisition of Arm. The reason is simple, because the deal has made little progress on the opposite side of getting the relevant regulatory approvals, or the high-profile deal will come to an end. If Nvidia finally decides to abandon the acquisition of Arm, it will have to pay SoftBank a fee of $1.25 billion.

In September 2020, Nvidia announced that it had purchased Arm from SoftBank for $40 billion in cash and stock, initially planned to be completed within 18 months, in March 2022. However, with the questioning and opposition of all parties, as well as stricter scrutiny by the relevant regulators, it was later postponed to September 2022. Arm has previously said it will be forced to consider an IPO if the deal progresses slowly, which has been a backup option for SoftBank and Arm.