Nvidia’s acquisition of Arm not only has to face scrutiny, Even if it succeeds, it faces complicated interest disputes

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The recent acquisition of Arm by Nvidia has encountered a lot of trouble, and it is not easy to pass the review of the regulatory agencies of various countries. If the transaction progresses slowly, Arm will be forced to consider an IPO, which has always been a backup plan for SoftBank and Arm. Although Arm is still advancing the development plan according to its own plan, it will inevitably be affected and involve more interest disputes.

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In order to better expand its business in China, Arm established a joint venture company, Arm China, which holds 49% of the shares. As the situation changes, Arm China begins to advocate independent development. Recently, Arm China released its new XPU strategic business, branded as “安谋科技”. In the future, it will drive strategic development with CPU+XPU and expand to computing units represented by NPU, ISP, VPU, GPU, etc. However, the development of Arm China does not seem to be so smooth sailing. Last year’s battle to seize power put Allen Wu, CEO of Arm China on the cusp, and involved the wrestling of all parties behind it.

According to HotHardware, in the view of Arm and Softbank, Allen Wu established a fund called Alphatecture to invest in companies using Arm technology, which made them very uneasy and suspected of conflict of interest. The two parties had negotiated, but they didn’t seem to reach an agreement. Instead, they got caught up in more and more complicated disputes, which made SoftBank tired. In view of the future also involving the authorization of Cortex-A77 and Armv9 architecture, the relationship between Arm and Arm China has become very delicate.

Even if Nvidia successfully acquires Arm, it will face the same problem. Due to the scale and importance of the Chinese market, it will have to spend a lot of time and energy to deal with it. In addition to financial reasons, there may be a struggle between the interests of all parties, which prompted SoftBank to make the decision to sell Arm.

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