The battle for NVIDIA to buy out Arm has officially reached its end as the GPU manufacturer has sold the last of its holdings in the company. NVIDIA first began expressing interest in purchasing the Cambridge, England-based chip designer back in the summer of 2020, when it was also revealed that Apple, Softbank, and Samsung had also looked into cutting a deal. NVIDIA would go on to pursue negotiations leading to a $40 billion deal a few months later, in September 2020. However, that step would be far from the end of the story.
U.S. regulatory authorities began an investigation into the acquisition just as 2020 came to an end, but that too was only the start of the resistance NVIDIA would encounter. Microsoft, Google, and Qualcomm all voiced their opposition to the purchase in the early part of 2021, but despite this, a few months later, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang remained optimistic that it would go through by 2022. However, roughly a year after proceedings began, European regulators also had concerns, and the idea of taking Arm to IPO was floated in July 2021. Not long after, in August, U.K. regulators stated the deal could present security concerns for the country, and Jensen was forced to admit deadlines might not be met.
At this point, things only went downhill for the deal. Come November 2021, it was revealed that NVIDIA could, and would eventually, lose $1.25 billion should the deal fall through. A month later, the FTC filed its case to prevent the buyout from happening, which ended up being the final nail in the coffin for this tech drama. NVIDIA abandoned the deal in the early months of 2022.
Now, according to Bloomberg, almost four years to the day, NVIDIA has sold the last of its stake in Arm Holdings PLC. Those 1.1 million shares roughly had a value of $140 million, which paled in comparison to the $1.25 billion compensation paid to Arm for the failed purchase agreement, but the story for these two is still not over. NVIDIA continues to partner with Arm on various collaborations for Arm-based SoCs, including the N1X/N1 aimed at the consumer market, and is said to compete with the x86 platform while combining Arm technology with NVIDIA’s Blackwell-based graphics. NVIDIA’s enterprise Grace CPUs are another example of the two companies working together. NVIDIA also continues to license Arm technologies for its Vera processors.