Components & Peripherals News
5 Big Things To Know About The $40B Nvidia-Arm Acquisition
Dylan Martin
Nvidia‘s $40 billion acquisition of Arm could have major consequences for the future of computing, from how the Arm ecosystem operates to how Nvidia develops next-generation capabilities for data centers and beyond. Here’s what you need to know now.
A Tectonic Shift In Computing Is Coming
Nvidia is set to make a tectonic shift in the computing landscape with its proposed $40 billion acquisition of Arm, but with the British chip designer‘s technology so widely used across the industry, the deal is likely to face heavy scrutiny from industry players and regulators alike.
The Nvidia-Arm acquisition was announced on Sunday, putting an end to rumors that began in July with reports that Nvidia was interesting in buying Arm from its current Japanese owner, SoftBank Group, which acquired Arm for $32 billion in 2016.
[Related: Nvidia's Ian Buck: A100 GPU Will 'Future-Proof' Data Centers For AI ]
While Nvidia made its first fortune with graphics cards for PC games, the company eventually found a way to take advantage of GPU technology for high-performance computing and AI, paving a way for it to enter the data center market. That bet is starting to pay off as the company‘s data center revenue exceeded sales for gaming products for the first time in its history earlier this year.
But as Nvidia has demonstrated with its new deal to acquire Arm and its $7 billion acquisition of Mellanox Technologies that closed in April, the company‘s ambitions go well beyond GPUs in its bid to become the “world’s premier computing company,” as CEO Jensen Huang said Sunday.
What follows are five important things to know about the Nvidia-Arm deal, Nvidia‘s path to becoming a larger player in the computing space and Arm’s role in the tech ecosystem.
