Nvidia makes concessions to the EU on the acquisition of Arm

Recently Bloomberg reported that the European Commission stated that the review of Nvidia’s acquisition of Arm was extended to at least October 27. At the same time, NVIDIA made certain concessions to the EU to persuade the EU antitrust regulators to approve the transaction but did not provide a detailed description of NVIDIA’s proposal. However, insiders believe that the regulatory review of relevant EU institutions should take longer.

According to Reuters, EU regulators are seeking opinions from all parties to decide whether to accept Nvidia’s concessions. It is also possible to make more requests or initiate a four-month survey to receive more feedback to clarify the situation of NVIDIA. Nvidia is currently persuading antitrust regulators in different regions that its acquisition of Arm is highly complementary, that is, Nvidia does not have a CPU business, and Arm has not deepened its GPU business. However, competitors generally expressed concern about this, believing that once NVIDIA obtains Arm’s CPU IP, it will restrict other competitors from obtaining the latest technology.

In April this year, Citigroup analysts said that Nvidia’s acquisition of Arm only has a 10% chance of obtaining regulatory approvals from around the world. Earlier, the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced that it would conduct a second phase of investigation into Nvidia’s acquisition of Arm, and has sent a summary of the results of the first phase of the investigation to the Minister of Digitalization, Culture, Media and Sports Oliver Dowden, expressing concerns about national security. The second phase of the investigation is the last review phase of the CMA. The maximum time is 24 weeks and can be extended up to 8 weeks. This means that if all goes well, CMA will announce its decision on the transaction in late February 2022. If the investigation time is extended, it will be until April 2022.