Nvidia announced an agreement to purchase ARM from Softbank for $ 40 billion.
The announcement was made on Sunday afternoon, and the form of payment is 12 billion in cash, from ARM, with two billion at the time of signing. In addition, Nvidia will have to buy 21,5 billion shares, while ARM employees will have 1,5 billion shares of Nvidia.
“Artificial intelligence is the most important technological force of our age and has launched a new wave of computing,” says Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “In the years to come, billions of computers capable of running some kind of artificial intelligence will create a new Internet of Things that is thousands of times larger than the Internet of people we know now. Our combination will create a company that is enviable and well positioned for this era of artificial intelligence ”.
“This combination has tremendous benefits for both companies, our customers and the industry,” adds Huang. “For the ARM ecosystem, the combination greatly accelerates ARM's research and development capabilities and will expand its patent portfolio with Nvidia's leading GPU and AI technology.
ARM will continue in Cambridge, UK. Huang says the facility will be expanded to become a "world leading center for artificial intelligence research" with the aim of attracting researchers from around the world.
Nvidia plans to build a supercomputer based on ARM technologies.
Softbank bought ARM in 2016 for $ 32 billion.
ARM e Apple
As is known, Apple has announced that it is developing its own board using the ARM architecture, to use it in its computers and abandon the Intel problem.
However, Apple will not use the chips purchased from ARM, but will instead use an ARM instruction set (likely the ARM64 that the A chips incorporate (from the iPhone 5S), but is likely to have a perpetual license for it - or at least with an extremely long service life.
Apple does not license any chips or chip designs from ARM, but designs them on its own. This is why no competitor using ARM chips can match their performance. And precisely for this reason Apple is not (was) interested in buying ARM Holdings: ARM's business is to license the technology to third parties, while Apple's business is to own that technology.
