Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang: The failed acquisition of Arm does not affect Nvidia’s strategic direction

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On February 8, 2022, NVIDIA and SoftBank announced the termination of the previous transaction, and NVIDIA officially abandoned the acquisition of Arm. In September 2020, Nvidia announced the purchase of Arm from SoftBank for $40 billion in cash and stock. However, with the doubts and objections of all parties and the stricter scrutiny of the relevant regulatory agencies, the transaction has been unable to proceed, and the transaction can only be canceled in the end. In the eyes of many people, this incident is a big blow to Nvidia and may affect its original development plan.
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Image: Nvidia

Recently, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang accepted an interview with VentureBeat. When asked if Nvidia needed a new strategic direction after the failed acquisition of Arm, Jensen Huang said:

VentureBeat: What is your post-Arm strategy? Do you have to communicate your strategic direction in light of [the Arm deal being called off]?

Jensen Huang: Not really anything. Because we never finished combining with Arm. So any strategies that would have come from the combination were never talked about. And so our strategy is exactly the same. We do accelerated computing for wherever there are CPUs (central processing units) . And so we’ll do that for x86. And we’ll do we do that for Arm. We have a whole bunch of ARM CPUs, and system-on-chips (SoCs) in development. And we’re enthusiasts. We do all that. We have a 20-year license to Arm’s intellectual property. And we’ll continue to take advantage of all that and all the markets. And that’s about it. Keep building CPUs, GPUs (graphics processing units), and DPUs (data processing units).

In addition, when asked if RISC-V would be considered in the absence of a successful acquisition of Arm, Jensen Huang said:

VB: So it’s your three-chip strategy? Would you consider RISC-V now that the Arm deal is not happening?

Huang: We use RISC-V. We’re RISC-V users inside our GPUs. We use it in several areas. For system controllers, inside the Bluefield GPU, there is a RISC-V acceleration engine, if you will, a programmable engine. And we use RISC-V when it makes sense. We use Arm when it makes sense. We use x86 when it makes sense.

Although in Jensen Huang’s view, the failure to acquire Arm has not changed anything, and there is no need to worry too much about the future, there is still very close cooperation between the two parties, but it does mean that any possibility of shaping Arm’s architectural roadmap in their own way is lost.

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