Nvidia reportedly to acquire ARM Holdings from SoftBank for $40B

There is nothing EU can or should do here, no matter how you feel about the move.

The US is the world's biggest single market, by a considerable margin over the EU now. It was larger than the EU before Brexit, now it's that much bigger.

US GDP for 2019 was around $21.5 trillion.

EU GDP for 2019 minus the UK is $16 trillion ($18.7 trillion with the UK).

That giant $5.5 trillion gap is big enough to fit the world's #3 economy (Japan) into. It's larger than France + Italy ($4.7t), or Germany + Spain ($5.2t).

Given the major economies of the EU haven't seen any net economic growth since 2006-2007, it's unlikely the EU will match up to the US economically in the coming decades. Over the coming 10-20 years it will persistently fall away, an increasing distant third behind the two superpowers of the US and China. And that's the good scenario and assuming there are no more exits from the EU. The US will become more aggressive about its trade imbalance with the EU, with the EU heavily dependent on exports and in a position of weakness with the US accordingly; and China will seek to compete with and replace the high value manufacturing they import from the EU (with most of the focus in both cases on Germany, their future is stagnation if they don't figure out how to move to a modern tech economy and fast). Germany will go through a very painful deindustrialization that they've largely been able to avoid thus far, as China goes after their high-end manufacturing and then exports those competing goods to the rest of the world far cheaper than Germany can.

France GDP: 2008, $2.9 trillion | 2019, $2.7 trillion

Germany GDP: 2008, $3.8 trillion | 2019, $3.8 trillion

Italy GDP: 2008, $2.4 trillion | 2019, $2 trillion

Spain GDP: 2008, $1.6 trillion | 2019, $1.4 trillion

Netherlands GDP: 2008, $948 billion | 2019, $902 billion

And that's of course pre-pandemic. Those are the five largest economies of the EU, accounting for 73% of the EU economy. They're going to see a likely net zero (or negative) economic growth for 20 years or more (inflation adjusted it's going to be brutal).

The DG COMP investigations are usually triggered via complaints raised by member states however they can also decide to investigate it own their own, once they done if any action needs to be taken they would authorize the regulators in each member state to take that action they do not enforce actions themselves.

However there still needs to be a violation of either Article 101 or 102 for them to investigate, this is quite different from the Chinese case where NXP and Qualcomm had to seek permission from the Antitrust regulator, in this case if NVIDIA requires one it would only be from the UK regulator and there is currently no freaking way that Brussels would interject in the midst of Brexit.

A year, 5, 10 down the line they might decide to open an antitrust case if they believe that NVIDIA's practices warrant an investigation, but currently there is no way for them to block the sale.

You are talking about Desktop / Server CPUs I presume. The problem is that this is detrimental to the competition in the mobile / phone CPU space as Nvidia is a direct (although not very big) competitor to Qualcomm, MediaTek, Samsung, HiSilicon etc., but would now own the architecture everyone is using.

IBM knows how to license an ISA and has heard of open source. NVIDIA hates open source almost as much as Oracle. I'm pretty sure its not going to go well if NVIDIA gets ARM.