FTC Has Questions Over Nvidia’s Arm Takeover

Nvidia is seeking regulatory approvals of its Arm acquisition in multiple jurisdictions, but the company is facing hurdles basically everywhere. After the EU and the UK launched in-depth probes into the deal, Nvidia has now revealed that the US Federal Trade Commission has also expressed “concerns” about the takeover. Those concerns will require unspecified remediations. 

“Regulators at the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have expressed concerns regarding the transaction, and we are engaged in discussions with the FTC regarding remedies to address those concerns,” a statement by Nvidia reads. 

The concerns of the US FTC are unknown, but it is more than likely that they are very similar to those expressed by anticompetitive regulators from Europe and the UK. Nvidia badly needs CPU assets to address data centers, high-performance computing (HPC), edge computing, and automotive segments. Still, once it gets Arm and develops its own solutions for the said segments, it will compete against licensees of Arm technologies. 

While Nvidia’s management assures that its Grace CPU is designed solely to accompany its compute GPUs, it also says that it could address general data center workloads and therefore compete against AMD’s EPYC, Amazon’s Graviton, Ampere’s Altra, and Intel’s Xeon processors. 

Want more news? Subscribe to CPI’s free daily newsletter for more headlines and updates on antitrust developments around the world.