The three major chip manufacturers support Nvidia’s acquisition of Arm, but China’s "public opinion" may be weak

Recently, British media "THE TIMES" reported that Broadcom, MediaTek, and Midman Electronics have expressed their support for Nvidia to acquire Arm for US$40 billion. They are the first semiconductor manufacturers to publicly support this acquisition.

In September last year, Nvidia publicly stated that it would acquire SoftBank’s Arm for US$40 billion. As soon as this news came out, it attracted widespread attention from the industry. The most important point is that people are worried that Arm will lose its neutral position after Nvidia acquires Arm. It will have a significant impact on Arm's customers in the fields of mobile terminals, the Internet of Things, and high-performance computing.

The current progress of this incident is that Nvidia must first obtain approval from the UK, and then obtain approval from China.

In the UK, foreign media said that Nvidia has not yet submitted an application for approval to the European Commission, and if the European holiday is delayed, Nvidia may not be able to complete the acquisition of Arm in March 2022. Because according to the plan, Nvidia expects to complete the acquisition in 18 months.

Regarding China's regulatory approval, Nvidia only submitted an approval application in June, and it is expected that China will be the last country to weigh Nvidia's acquisition of Arm.

In a recent AIoT roundtable forum, in the live vote on whether Nvidia can successfully acquire Arm, 75% of industry professionals said they could not, and only 25% said they could succeed. This may explain to a certain extent that China's semiconductor industry is not optimistic about the acquisition of Arm by NVIDIA.

Not long ago, Xinmou Research also pointed out that in their interviews and research, almost all interviewees believed that the probability of Nvidia's successful acquisition of Arm was very low. In terms of the proportion of opinions, the top three think that they will not succeed in acquisitions, undermine openness and business models, and affect China's industrial development.

However, NVIDIA CEO Huang Renxun is confident about this acquisition. During the Six-Five Summit, Huang Renxun said: "The important thing people like about NVIDIA and Arm transactions is that NVIDIA's AI technology can be brought to all corners of the market through Arm's network. The Internet of Things and edge AI are emerging, but the foundation of AI Sex technology has not yet been widely deployed."

Arm CEO Segars also said, “To deal with these opportunities, Arm alone cannot achieve it, but by combining with NVIDIA, we will have much more resources than now to develop a richer IP portfolio to promote these opportunities. The development and delivery of face-to-face applications," Segars said.

Talking about the issue of export control, Segars said, “A large number of our products are developed in the UK, most of which are developed outside the US. There are indeed a small number of Arms products that are affected by the US export control policy, but Most products are not within the scope of the US export control policy. After NVIDIA acquires Arm, this pattern will not change in any way."

NVIDIA CEO Huang Renxun’s “willing to win” is in stark contrast to the lack of confidence in China’s “public opinion”. This is indeed a challenging acquisition.