
Posted on Wednesday, October 21 2020 @ 11:47 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
As expected, NVIDIA's $40 billion quest to acquire chip designer ARM will not go without problems. Bloomberg
reports Chinese tech firms like Huawei have expressed strong concerns to local regulators about the deal. The news agency says multiple of China's most influential tech firms have urged the State Administration for Market Regulation to either flat out reject the takeover or to impose conditions to ensure access to the ARM architecture.
China’s fear is that Arm -- whose semiconductor designs and architecture are central to most of the world’s electronics from smartphones to supercomputers -- will become yet another pawn in a U.S.-Chinese struggle for tech supremacy. Nvidia is buying the British firm from Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp., bringing it under American jurisdiction and theoretically threatening its cherished status as a neutral party in the chip industry. SoftBank’s shares erased gains Wednesday to close slightly lower in Tokyo.