With the acquisition to be completed next year, NVIDIA becomes one of the most influential companies in the IT field, the main supplier of processors for 90% of the smartphone and other mobile devices market.
Following negotiations between NVIDIA and SoftBank Group, the Japanese investment fund will sell its portfolio held in ARM Holdings for $ 40 billion, $ 8 billion more than the amount paid to the company in 2016. No matter how steep, the growth The price is explained by the fact that ARM Holdings has meanwhile become a major player in the PC market, its processors will be equipped with both Mac OS and Windows systems.
Following the acquisition of ARM, NVIDIA becomes the dominant manufacturer of processors
Under the new organization, ARM Holdings will continue to operate its open licensing model of processor architectures, operating as a branch of NVIDIA, based in the United Kingdom.
According to information obtained from sources close to the company, NVIDIA intends to keep the name and brand identity of the acquired company, while expanding its base in Cambridge. At the same time, the ARM intellectual property portfolio will remain registered in the United Kingdom.
Given that ARM technologies are found in chipsets manufactured by major players such as Samsung, Apple and Qualcomm, we can say that NVIDIA is gaining a huge influence on them. At the same time, Microsoft is already producing an edition of the Surface tablet with ARM processor, which will run a version of Windows 10 specially adapted for this architecture. And Apple recently announced that it is giving up the x86 architecture, with future Mac systems going to use ARM processors with a custom design.
Thus, the value of ARM Holdings can only increase further, the transaction that would be completed in September 2021 being one of strategic importance, through which NVIDIA ensures a central role in the chipset market for mobile devices, a market segment. in which he had little to say. Although it is the largest manufacturer of graphics accelerators in the world, NVIDIA’s influence on the mobile segment has been limited to its own range of Tegra chipsets, used on devices such as the Nintendo Switch game console.
In addition to including NVIDIA graphics acceleration solutions in the ARM offering, as ready-to-use options for chipset makers, we can expect to see an evolutionary leap in the AI Computing segment, achieved by combining ARM and NVIDIA technologies in new, more efficient architectures.
Juana loves to cover the tech and gaming industry, she always stays on the first row of CES conference and reports live from there.
