SoftBank to sell Arm Holdings to Nvidia; Update: It was just officially announced!

[EJMB]

Update (9/14/2020):

Quote

SoftBank will receive $12 billion in cash, including $2 billion paid to Arm at signing, and $21.5 billion in Nvidia stock. Another $5 billion will be paid to SoftBank in cash or stock if certain Arm financial targets are met, while $1.5 billion in Nvidia shares will be issued to Arm employees.

SoftBank and the Vision Fund will end up with a stake of between 6.7% and 8.1% stake in Nvidia.

 

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SoftBank is set to sell the UK's Arm Holdings to US chip company Nvidia for more than 40 Billion US dollars and it will be a matter of a cash-and-stock takeover. This may be announced as soon as Monday and will make SoftBank will become the largest shareholder in the US chip company.

 

Quote

 "For Nvidia, which recently overtook Intel to become the world's most valuable chipmaker, the deal will further consolidate the US company's position at the centre of the semiconductor industry. The British chip designer's technology is starting to find broader applications beyond mobile devices, in data centres and personal computers including Apple's Macs.
Arm would transform Nvidia's product line-up, which until now has largely focused on the high end of the chips market. Its powerful graphics processors - which are designed to handle focused, data-intensive tasks - are typically sold to PC gamers, scientific researchers and developers of artificial intelligence and self-driving cars, as well as cryptocurrency miners."

 

The fear of the possibility of a large conglomerate corporation like Nvidia will have too much control in the industry (or any company in any industry) is one that I'm sure a lot of people will be concerned about.
This might not be good moving forward.

 

Sources

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/SoftBank2/SoftBank-set-to-sell-UK-s-Arm-Holdings-to-Nvidia-for-40bn

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/SoftBank2/SoftBank-reaches-40bn-deal-to-sell-Arm-to-US-chipmaker-Nvidia

 

Edited September 14, 2020 by EJMB

[captain_to_fire]

Still no hope of NVIDIA GPUs coming back to the Mac since Apple is making their own using TBDR process. I don't think this is going to affect the chip development for the likes of Qualcomm, Apple, Samsung and TSMC.

[Donut417]

5 minutes ago, like_ooh_ahh said:

Still no hope of NVIDIA GPUs coming back to the Mac since Apple is making their own using TBDR process. I don't think this is going to affect the chip development for the likes of Qualcomm, Apple, Samsung and TSMC.

If Nvidia is smart they will continue business like usual with ARM. People will pay licensing and they will make money.  What Id be interested in is what they can do for ARM. Nvidia has some smart cookies working for them, so it will be interesting in what the future brings. 

[PineyCreek]

From what I've heard it's an "early agreement" for 40B USD...not necessarily a confirmation, and also possibly subject to various regulators.

 

That being said, nigh on everyone watching the industry has been saying NVDA stock is one of the few that would probably weather the inevitable corrections fairly well...doesn't seem to be an end to their growth spurt...they put out good product and charge medium to top dollar for it....now if only they would stop being so annoying with their different SKUs.

[The_russian]

4 minutes ago, PineyCreek said:

they put out good product and charge medium to top dollar for it....now if only they would stop being so annoying with their different SKUs.

Yeah they make good products, it seems to be their marketing department that makes questionable decisions, as seems the case for more and more companies these days. 

[SupaKomputa]

They sense the future is ARM. They can be the next Intel.

Now we have 3 way CPU-GPU manufacturer.

Intel - Xe

AMD - Radeon

Nvidia ARM - GTX

[PineyCreek]

1 minute ago, SupaKomputa said:

They sense the future is ARM. They can be the next Intel.

Now we have 3 way CPU-GPU manufacturer.

Intel - Xe

AMD - Radeon

Nvidia ARM - GTX

CPU - GPU

Intel - Meh

AMD - We're here too
nVidWe are the Borg - Resistance is Futile

[Fatih19]

Maybe it's all a 5D chess move. Once they bought ARM, they'll stop selling license to Apple unless Apple include their GPU.

[Shreyas1]

With how much the company has grown, I hope it doesn't cost Nvidia an ARM and a leg

 

 

 

 

Im sorry

[CarlBar]

25 minutes ago, Fatih19 said:

Maybe it's all a 5D chess move. Once they bought ARM, they'll stop selling license to Apple unless Apple include their GPU.

 

I'm pretty sure the regulators would tear NVIDIA apart if they tried tat. Figuratively and literally.

[JoseGuya]

1 hour ago, Fatih19 said:

Maybe it's all a 5D chess move. Once they bought ARM, they'll stop selling license to Apple unless Apple include their GPU.

And isn't Apple like a founder of ARM? They could have some benefits from that

[lewdicrous]

9 minutes ago, JoseGuya said:

And isn't Apple like a founder of ARM?

What?

[williamcll]

Cool but does that mean I will get a nintendo RTX?

[Video Beagle]

9 hours ago, Fatih19 said:

Maybe it's all a 5D chess move. Once they bought ARM, they'll stop selling license to Apple unless Apple include their GPU.

 

Apple was the first company approached to buy ARM, they turned down the offer. If there was any concern from them about someone owning ARM taking away their ability to use it, they'd have bought it themselves to secure the rights.

[Kroon]

9 hours ago, Donut417 said:

If Nvidia is smart they will continue business like usual with ARM.

I sincerely hope not. From an economical point of view are ARM not doing good.  Just the vast that SoftBank bought ARM for $31bn and not selling it after 4 years for "only" $40bn says a lot. That is less then 10% per year and not acceptable for an investment.

 

I hope that Nvidia stats to make changes in the company but even in the design part.  Nvidia should be able to help boosting the GFX preformance.

[RejZoR]

13 minutes ago, Kroon said:

I sincerely hope not. From an economical point of view are ARM not doing good.  Just the vast that SoftBank bought ARM for $31bn and not selling it after 4 years for "only" $40bn says a lot. That is less then 10% per year and not acceptable for an investment.

 

I hope that Nvidia stats to make changes in the company but even in the design part.  Nvidia should be able to help boosting the GFX preformance.

I still can't understand how can your tech be present in 99% of mobile devices and yet you're not doing well.

[Kroon]

1 minute ago, RejZoR said:

I still can't understand how can your tech be present in 99% of mobile devices and yet you're not doing well.

 

Making bad deals, selling your designs to cheap, poor licensing model etc etc...   Just the fact that so many uses it might be because it's to cheap.

[RejZoR]

2 minutes ago, Kroon said:

 

Making bad deals, selling your designs to cheap, poor licensing model etc etc...   Just the fact that so many uses it might be because it's to cheap.

Or because it's proven tech and there is a lot of software ready to be bolted on top, aka Android?

[jagdtigger]

Actually not just android, AFAIK debian and ubuntu already running on arm and most of their repositories are recompiled for it.

[RejZoR]

25 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

Actually not just android, AFAIK debian and ubuntu already running on arm and most of their repositories are recompiled for it.

And now also MacOS and also Windows 10 ARM...

[igormp]

I really would love to see both high end, server grade ARM CPUs from nvidia, with NVLINK built into it as the likes of POWER, along with nicer embedded solutions like the Jetson, but at lower price points.

 

4 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

Actually not just android, AFAIK debian and ubuntu already running on arm and most of their repositories are recompiled for it.

Most distros support AARCH64 already  And so do many of the BSDs.

 

5 hours ago, RejZoR said:

I still can't understand how can your tech be present in 99% of mobile devices and yet you're not doing well.

It is doing well, but it has stagnated. The most important thing for investors is how much a company can grow so they can reap the profits quickly. For a tech giant for nvidia, ARM would be a nice technical asset instead of just a big pile of money, pretty much like their purchase of mellanox.

[Donut417]

13 hours ago, JoseGuya said:

And isn't Apple like a founder of ARM?

Ummm. NO. Apple just licenses tech from ARM. Not sure what portions of ARM Apple uses, but they use a portion and pretty much have designed their own CPU. 

 

5 hours ago, Kroon said:

I sincerely hope not. From an economical point of view are ARM not doing good.  Just the vast that SoftBank bought ARM for $31bn and not selling it after 4 years for "only" $40bn says a lot. That is less then 10% per year and not acceptable for an investment.

 

Business as usual meaning they are still Listening and not being A holes with pricing. Because if they start being A holes, then the big bad government gets involved and bad things can happen. Also keep in mind, I dont really think Nvidia is buying ARM so they can make a ton of money. I think they are buying them because they think they can do better. They know that ARM is the future of mobile computing, so they want to be at the forefront of this. 

[Mihle]

I think the main goal of Nvidia  with ARM is to boost it with their own developers and then deliver servers that is only ARM and Nvidia GPUs.

Also, knowing Apple, their licensing agreement with ARM for patents and stuff is probably some sort of life long deal.

[Kroon]

31 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

Business as usual meaning they are still Listening and not being A holes with pricing.

Remember they have changed their licensing model due to poor profitability.  New licensing make it's even cheaper to start up a new businesses adventure while companies like Samsung will pay much more in the future.  Short term this will probably increase their profitability but once the big companies start to phase out ARM there is no going back.

[Donut417]

1 minute ago, Kroon said:

but once the big companies start to phase out ARM there is no going back.

Thats the thing. ARM is the future of mobile. Phones, Tablets, and much more will continue to use ARM for years and years. There is no Phase out. Nvidia sees that ARM is going to become a huge thing in the future. If anything you're going to see more ARM devices. Microsoft has been pushing Windows. First they had the Surface RT, which didn't do well, their Windows Phones, which again didn't do well, now they have a Surface Tablet that is ARM, but offers the ability to run some x86 Apps. I mean look at Apple, they have effectively told Intel to pound sand and are now going to use their own ARM CPU's to build their computers. ARM is here to stay.