The EU would start an investigation into the acquisition of chip developer Arm by Nvidia. The acquisition is worth about $54 billion.
That writes the Financial Times. With the acquisition announced at the end of last year, Nvidia could face competition restrictions. Nvidia is best known for its graphics cards for gamers and makes GPUs for data centres, among other things.
Arm, meanwhile, designs chip architectures that are used by almost all other chip makers via licenses. The two companies have been in informal talks for months, and Nvidia is expected to submit its official proposal on September 6, after which the various regulators can discuss it.
Earlier, the United Kingdom, where Arm is headquartered, also announced an investigation. Boris Johnson’s government says the takeover by US Nvidia may have implications for the country’s national security.
To appease that government, and also the competing chipmakers, Nvidia previously promised to build a kind of ‘firewall’ between the two companies so that Nvidia would not have access to the plans of a Qualcomm or Apple, for example. The arm is currently owned by the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank.
