The prospect of Arm’s intellectual property falling into Nvidia’s hands has drawn objections from some rivals, including Qualcomm. Nvidia said in a statement it would “continue to work to demonstrate that this transaction will benefit the industry and promote competition”, adding it would invest in Arm’s research and development, maintain its open licensing model and ensure its intellectual property was “available to all interested licensees”.Īrm’s designs for low-power chips already dominate the smartphone world and the technology is being adopted more widely, particularly in data centres, which are the focus of Nvidia’s latest growth push. Nvidia would have to pay the Japanese company a $1.25 billion break-up fee if the deal falls apart. The regulator pegged the value of the chip deal at $40 billion, though Nvidia’s soaring share price in the 14 months since it was announced has more than doubled the amount SoftBank would realise from the sale. Holly Vedova, director of the FTC’s bureau of competition, said the regulator was acting in order “to prevent a chip conglomerate from stifling the innovation pipeline for next-generation technologies”. Nvidia will have both “the means and incentive to stifle innovative next-generation technologies”, the FTC alleged, pointing to concerns about automated driving systems, networking chips found in data centres and the large-scale facilities of cloud computing companies.

The issues echo those flagged by UK regulators when they first expressed concerns about the deal in the summer. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said in a statement on Thursday that the cash and stock transaction – which has a valuation of $82 billion (€72 billion) and would be the largest takeover of a semiconductor group – would give one of the world’s biggest chip groups control over computing technology and designs that competitors rely on to create their own chips. US regulators have sued to block Nvidia’s multibillion-dollar acquisition of UK chip design company Arm from SoftBank, one of the most serious threats yet to a deal that has already run into scepticism from EU and UK authorities.

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