Daily US Times: ARM Holdings, a UK-based computer chip designer, is being sold to the American graphics chip specialist Nvidia.
The cash-and-stock deal values ARM as being worth as much as £31.2bn ($40bn). The firm has been struck by current owner, Japanese conglomerate Softbank, four years after it acquired ARM for $32bn.
ARM’s technology is at the heart of most smartphones, among many other devices.
Nvidia has promised to retain ARM’s brand, keep the business based in the UK, to hire more staff.
The company added that the deal would create “the premier computing company for the age of artificial intelligence” (AI).
The US firm’s chief executive Jensen Huang in a press release that ARM will remain headquartered in Cambridge.
“We will expand on this great site and build a world-class AI research facility, supporting developments in healthcare, life sciences, robotics, self-driving cars and other fields,” the statement added.
This appears to address concerns that decision-making shifted to the US and British jobs would be lost. Last week, the Labour Party had urged the government to intervene. But two of the co-founders of ARM have raised other issues about the takeover.
Tudor Brown and Hermann Hauser had suggested ARM should remain “neutral”, rather than be owned by a company like Nvidia, which produces its own processors.
The concern is that there would be a conflict of interest since ARM’s clients would become dependent on a business with which many also compete for sales.
Moreover, they both also claimed that once ARM was owned by an American firm, Washington could try to block Chinese companies from using its know-how as part of a wider trade clash between the countries.
But the US firm has said that it intends to maintain the “global customer neutrality” on which ARM’s success rests.
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