Nvidia’s reportedly interested in buying ARM from SoftBank

At this time it is unknown if SoftBank will sell its stake in ARM or list ARM to the public stock market, but that hasn’t stopped potential suitors from inquiring about the sale. 

Bloomberg has reported that SoftBank initially approached Apple about the sale, who was reportedly not interested in the purchase. This makes sense, given Apple’s lack of interest in ARM’s product/IP licensing model. Beyond that, Nvidia has registered its interest in ARM Ltd in recent weeks. 

Nvidia is best known as a graphics card manufacturer, but recent years has seen the company’s penetration into the server market explode with the onset of AI computing. Nvidia’s acquisition of Mellanox has also enabled Nvidia to create incredible system interconnects to make its latest AI offerings more powerful and scalable than ever before. The only thing that’s missing from Nvidia’s product stack is powerful processors, as so far Nvidia has been forced to rely on AMD and Intel to supply processors for its latest DGX computing solutions. 

Acquiring ARM would place Nvidia into greater competition with both AMD and Intel, allowing them to compete within the CPU, GPU and accelerator markets. Even so, such a move from Nvidia would need to pass through a lot of regulatory scrutinies, as ARM’s new owner would need to continue offering equal access to ARM’s instruction set.  
   
A deal to purchase ARM would be one of the largest in the history of the electronics industry, with SoftBank acquiring ARM for around $32 billion back in 2016.