EU to formally probe Nvidia's $54bn takeover over British chip designer Arm – report Nvidia told The Reg it would work "with the European Commission to address any concerns they may have" after reports it is set open a formal competition law investigation into the AI firm's purchase of Arm from Softbank. The Financial Times reported this morning that the political bloc will examine whether or not the $54bn …
With China being increasing belligerent in all areas, then the EU will huff and puff but will side with the US on this.
The Chinese will be kicking themselves for not buying ARM when they had the chance, as it has been very poorly managed by SoftBank - a bit like when HP was still an engineering company, and got taken over by marketers and beancounters and has destroyed its brand by not understanding where its value came from and nurturing that.
NVIDIA is a much better cultural and organisational fit for ARM than SoftBank and will add value in a way that the SoftBank arrangement never could.
While the generic RISC-V can do vanilla IoT the key driver is low power designs and high value IoT markets e.g. medicine, military, aerospace and automotive - and that require vertical integration, rapid R&D capability and subject matter expertise which ARM has - that is where the competitive advantage is.
If your market is big enough for the merging companies you do have a say in it.
China and the EU are two of the three biggest markets in the world. Unless Nvidia is happy to buy ARM but keep it separate in the EU or China (or never sell any products in the EU or China ever again) Nvidia will have to take their opinion into account.
Let me remind you of the case where the EU blocked the purchase of American company Honeywell by American company General Electric because it would have an adverse effect on competition. GE could not afford to lose the EU market so the purchase could not go ahead, despite the US antitrust regulator already having approved the deal.
It's indeed called the Brussels effect:
"The Brussels effect is the process of unilateral regulatory globalisation caused by the European Union de facto (but not necessarily de jure) externalising its laws outside its borders through market mechanisms. Through the Brussels effect, regulated entities, especially corporations, end up complying with EU laws even outside the EU for a variety of reasons. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect
It's no different in places like the USA, where one state passes legislation on for example... California, car emissions and it's too costly for the manufacturers to only apply them in those states with those specific laws.
So it gets applied universally across the country and the knock on effect of those countries they export too
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The ambivalence is killing me.
Firstly, this is a private company. The free market model means they should be free to trade. If that's the entire company, so be it. Beak out.
Secondly, the EU messing around with an Anglo-British deal despite not having jurisdiction over either party. Again, snout away.
Then we come to my overriding pain: As someone who grew up at a time when computer == Acorn, exporting the success that is ARM (it is - or was - an acronym, people, [Acorn|Advanced] RISC Machines) and the resulting diminution of tech boom in Cambridge is something of a disaster. Why do we keep selling off our success? I am within touching distance of one x86_64, a Cortex M0, two arm64 devices, two arm7s and a MIPS. That's a 5:2 ratio of ARM to other architectures, completely ignoring SMP capabilities of each and that's just my workspace.
My answer? Sod it. Que sera, sera. It's out of my control so I'll not worry about it.
In any sane universe this merger damages competition and choice.
If any competition authority anywhere in the world approves it, the individuals should directly leave the building, turn out the lights as they go, throw away the key and sign on the dole.
Recent years have seen precious few mergers banned outright and for me at least, it feels as though the competition authorities pay nothing but lip service to investigating anything. There is literally utterly no point in paying for a competition authority that never bans a merger.
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