Rumor: Nvidia wants to buy Arm

Nvidia would be interested in the acquisition of chip designer Arm. That say sources involved in this to financial news agency Bloomberg. Last week, it was announced that SoftBank, the current owner of Arm, is considering a sale.

Nvidia has reached out to Arm over a possible acquisition in recent weeks, according to Bloomberg sources. Other bidders could emerge, according to the sources, but details are not yet known.

The Wall Street Journal announced last week that Japan’s SoftBank wants to sell all or part of Arm Holdings. An IPO would also be investigated, allowing the company to continue independently. SoftBank acquired Arm in 2016 for £ 24.3 billion. At the time about 29 billion euros.

Bloomberg argues that a possible acquisition of Arm by Nvidia could become the largest acquisition in the chip industry. Nvidia has become worth about eight times as much in the past four years. The company, which makes video cards, is mainly growing thanks to its GPUs for data centers. By incorporating Arm, Nvidia could theoretically make complete systems for data centers itself, with both CPUs and GPUs. Now Nvidia combines its data center GPUs with Epyc and Xeon CPUs from AMD and Intel.

According to Bloomberg, SoftBank has also approached Apple. The companies would have had talks, but Apple would not intend to make an offer for Arm. Arm’s business model consists largely of licensing chip designs to other companies, and that would not fit Apple’s strategy.

A takeover of Arm by another company in the same industry is likely to be under the scrutiny of regulators and competition authorities. Many companies now depend on the licenses they purchase from Arm to make chips.