FTC sues to block Nvidia-Arm merger
ftc.gov
ftc.gov
1) Nvidia designs expensive chips and sells them by the millions. [1]
2) ARM designs cheap chips and sells them by the billions. [2]
3) Nvidia's "normal" product departments are incentivized to prevent ARM from competing with Nvidia's expensive chips, in various ways. This would hinder ARM's innovation and growth opportunities vs being independent.
I am glad to see this motion to block the merger, for the sake of a competitive market for CPUs, GPUs, etc.
[1] https://www.techradar.com/news/nvidia-hits-new-highs-in-gpu-...
[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/arm-6-7-billion-chips-per-...
Whatever Nvidia wants to do with licensing they have to combat market forces already in play. There's a market for somewhat less expensive arm chips, for one, so they'd lose that revenue. Two, if they want to royally fuck arm shops and become the only ARM vendor, well, good luck... you just killed the ISA you bought for 40 billion...
It's taken the better part of a decade for workable alternatives to CUDA to emerge.
it’s really not close. I love that they are trying, I just honestly feel they need to be trying with 10 times as much funding/resources behind them.
Or do you mean Apple’s Metal Compute? useful only with inconvenient (at scale) Apple hardware.
If workable CUDA alternatives were really here, I feel people would be talking about them more given how large the hate is for Nvidia on multi fronts from multiple different user groups.
As for Vulkan, I tend to think of CUDA at the driver level given how closely coupled it is to Nvidia’s hardware. So I wasn’t really thinking about broader cross compatible APIs like Vulkan which tend to get implemented on top of the drivers providing low level access like CUDA gives… but with the exception of Apple (because we know they will never change their mind) I’m hoping the broader industry gets behind Vulkan compute shaders enough we finally get something that delivers on the promises made when the OpenCL effort began. I want clean understandable abstractions over the top of all the different SIMD and MIMD capabilities we have these days it doesn’t have to magically compile my code down to FPGA hardware but how about actually being able to get the best matrix multiplication performance out of both my CPU or GPU or both if I have a CPU with the right kind of integrated GPU that they can efficiently enough share memory and both work together without slowing each other down when working on an embarrassingly parallel matrix multiplication task. Is this really too much to ask of software in an an era that gives us near magical JIT performance in multiple languages, and manages to build cross compile/transpilation tools that can convert entire assembly code bases into JavaScript and all the other nice things we have as software developers… it never felt like too much to me but the fate of OpenCL appears to disagree.
nvidia decided they wanted to be the market leader, and spent $$$$ developing tools, training materials, and libraries (like cuDNN) which they gave away for free.
Other GPU vendors chose not to outspend them.
Tensorflow lets you deploy to quite a few backends.
oneAPI support in GPUArrays.jl seems to be coming along.
That said, the replacement ISA already exists IMO: RISC-V
It's better to create a better thing first, even unfairly, and let it outcompete the incumbent.
Laptops were all x86-32/64. There has been an UltraSPARC laptop (one AFAIK), and Apple switched away from POWER because of power inefficiency. Also before the smartphone revolution.
Intel was busy with Moblin and PowerTOP back in the 00s. This before iPhone.
MIPS and RISC-V also exist. Without ARM it would've happened but slower/later.
The only competition was from Motorola/IBM POWER (and MIPS in some niche products), but neither Motorola nor IBM ever tried to offer low cost products.
During 2000 to 2005, I have ported some products with embedded computers from POWER to ARM.
The porting was not very easy, because the ARM CPUs had much lower performance, but they were much cheaper, so the conversion was done anyway.
The ARM advantage has always been in its business model, which created a lot of competing CPU vendors, willing to give you the best price, not in any technical advantages of its CPU architecture.
The NVIDIA acquisition certainly threatens this business model, despite all contrary claims of the NVIDIA management.
Today MIPS is still used in network devices, SH is still used in things like optical drives, SPARC is still used on some servers, x86 is still used on many servers and desktops and mobile devices, and so on and so forth. Do you think that there is something technical that warrants the choice of these architectures for their usecases ? Do you think that there is something in SH that makes it a better ISA particularly for CD-ROM drives ? Or that there is something in SH that made it a better ISA for some videogame console generations, then something changed and the better ISA was PPC, then ARM, then x86 again ?
It's mostly arbitrary marketing decisions, which manufacturer happened to be doing well that day, and some "historical reasons"/network effects which define these choices. There's very little difference at this ISA/architectural level, and a lot in the actual design and manufacturing level, where ARM is not doing poorly but hardly shines. Apple, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, even nVidia all do better than ARM there.
If we the wind had blown even slightly differently some day 20 years ago, we may very well be using anything else, even say Itanium in our smartphones. And before you complain that Itanium/EPIC are hardly suited for low power, remember that Transmeta made their money selling _low-power_ VLIW processors emulating x86 instructions. And actually they were lower power than their x86 competition those days. Perhaps Torvalds would still be there rather than making Linux...
Qualcomm makes ARM chips for phones.
No, you can't buy either such device today, but reason they lost out had nothing to do with them being inappropriate for such use.
The advantage of ARM has always been the cost. For given requirements of performance and power draw, you could find much cheaper ARM CPUs than the existing alternatives.
This happened because there were many competing ARM CPU vendors.
Motorola could give you a PowerPC CPU with the same or better performance and power draw, but they were not willing to lower their prices, falsely believing that there are no alternatives.
Therefore everybody abandoned the other CPU architectures and switched to the cheaper ARM solutions.
The thing is only Arm did actually designed appropriate chips at the right time and licensed those designs in the best way possible. Arm was IBM PC of the smartphone era and I don't understand how people might not appreciate that.
When Nokia and Ericsson switched to ARM the company was probably saved from bankruptcy.
And those elements are used to enable the manufacture and sale of cheap chips. Semantics aside, ARM is the critical player in several market segments.
The business model does not fit.
Most companies license the cores, so they can build ARM-designed cores and integrate those into an SoC.
In order to design your own core, you need to license the ISA itself, and that’s a wholly different kettle of fishes: there are only about a dozen architectural licensees, and not all of them license both 32 and 64b ISAs.
If barrier of entry is the issue isn't that what people should be striving for?
I have a MacBook Pro with M1 ARM chip, and I love it, it’s extremely power efficient, I don’t really have to think much about charging it. It wouldn’t be possible if NVIDIA could force its chips on Apple.
The official number is 17 hours, bu I never had to test it in real life. The crazy thing is charging to 50% in 30 minutes, and 50% is enough to get me through my trips.
For battery longevity, in general I would charge to 90% and then use it until 20%, then recharge to 90% again. This makes the most out of the battery charge cycles, and avoid the increased stress of close-to-0% charge (bad if there for longer time) and close-to-100% charge (less bad but still better not to go there often). But maybe M1 battery system is different for some reason, I don't know.
A more reliable solution is to manipulate pmset directly, or use something like AlDente which handles it for you (the paid version has lots of extra features but the free one suffices to avoid charging above 80% by default).
Obviously when charging time arrives you need to realise yourself and plug in somewhere between 20 and 40%.
The only annoyance is the magsafe’s LED remains amber even when the mac stops charging at 80%.
On my m1 air I’ve only known it to charge to 80% after a period of several weeks where it was docked. As soon as I started using it away from power for significant amounts of time it went back to charging to 100%.
I just checked what happened last time. I went to bed around 2300, it quickly charged to 80% (getting there a bit after 2400), then stayed there until 0200, at which point it decided to charge to 100 which it had reached by 0400.
As it does every workday, and has since before I had that specific phone (which is 2 years old), the alarm woke me at 0600.
So over a 7h night it managed to spend more time at 100% than it did at 80. I’m not going to say I’m impressed, because I’m not. Based on usage pattern I could see it fail to reach 100% by 0600, but I don’t think I’ve woken at 4 once in the last 3 years.
There is zero crazy about that part, it's just 1C charging which is not even extra hard on the batteries.
These things are very power efficient while actually computing, but they are extremely power efficient while idle. The whole SoC uses a couple dozen milliwatts while in active idle state (e.g. screen off, machine up and responding to pings via WiFi).
For reference, the last zoom call I was on (2 hours) with nearly max brightness only drained the battery ~5%. My Intel MBP would’ve been down at least 20%.
I’ve had a range of MacBooks (2013, 2016, 2020, 2021) and it just isn’t a competition. The M1 is head and shoulders above the other models in battery life.
If anyone is curious, third parties can license specific designs and drop them in their chips, or architecture licensees can design their own chips, like the M1, based on the instruction set architecture. There are around a dozen or so companies with an architecture license.
If they have to renegotiate with NVIDIA to get access to ARMv10, it would be quite nasty if NVIDIA decided they wanted a bigger piece of Apple's pie, especially if Apple has developed competitive GPU technology that made NVIDIA's somewhat obsolete.
Each generation of ARM ISA, e.g ARMv7 and ARMv8 are treated as separate license, mostly because they are incompatible. ( Possibly with the exception of ARMv9 which is really a ARMv8++ ) You dont get future ARMv10 work just because you keep paying. ARM's extension are a different matter.
(Important, not just trolling)
For whom ?
Although I imagine the problem with a lot of newer crap will be draconian DRM measures freaking out at being ran in Parallels. Which are games I will never buy.
Stopping two US companies from merging because it would create a monopoly and negatively impact US consumers is one thing. But this isn't even remotely the case here? Doesn't the US government get more tax revenue if Nvidia makes some extra dough charging royalties for that IP? I’m confused.
I like Nvidia (because I don't have to work with them), but I don't think they are the right steward for ARM in any way.
- Microsoft was mostly contractual on the Xbox, Nvidia didn't want to lower the price of the chips over the lifespan of the 1st Xbox which was a huge no-no. And some technical people also had a terrible experience (some people in the DirectX team had strong thoughts about working with Nvidia).
- Sony was mostly about terrible tech support and not wanting to share enough technical details which hampered AAA devs a whole lot, to the point most ended up using the SPUs in very creative (and technically fascinating) ways to compensate (the GTA V engine on PS3 was truly impressive in that regard).
- There were some minor (but acrimonious) back and forth with Apple over a failing gen of GPUs (G80s if memory serves), but the large fallout came for the same reason as for the rest of the mobile industry : the Kepler licensing initiative.
Long story short, Nvidia tried to assert patents on mobile GPU (ala Microsoft on Android, as a way to "sell" their exit of the mobile market to investors). They then sued Samsung and Qualcomm [1]. Samsung countersued Nvidia, which had to settle as Samsung was close to winning a ban on imports from some Nvidia products [2]. Many of the patents Nvidia tried to assert were thrown out and they had a terrible legal time.
The damage that ill thought strategy did to Nvidia is hard to measure but there's not a single mobile company that wanted that acquisition to go forward and many are probably quite relieved after this.
[1] : https://www.zdnet.com/article/nvidia-launches-patent-suit-ag... [2] : https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nvidia-samsung-elec-idUSK...
Not going to be a thing going forward, of course. The M1 (next seems to be M3 at 3nm ?) will handle the GPU from here on out
"Free trade" and "Free markets" has never meant "totally unregulated".
That's completely flawed reasoning that ignores the actual purpose of those things, which is to encourage increased/better supply of products and services to consumers at the best possible price.
Also, I don’t believe the FTC mission is to increase US tax revenue, so that aspect seems irrelevant.
This isn't a question of "will the economy collapse if X buys Y" it's a question of "Which will yeild the best outcome, Y being acquired by X or no". The exact definition of "best outcome" is where the entire battleground though.
It is quite difficult to see who actually could acquire ARM though - because of ARM's quite unique position, any of the potential acquirers are either customers (Apple, Nvidia, Qualcomm) who would be vertically integrated to beat out competitors or direct competitors (AMD, Intel). I think almost the only people who could buy ARM at this point would be TSMC.
Softbank can still sell ARM to anyone including the public market, they just won't get as much money for them that way. Presumably.
As much as it's easy to forget, the free market is supposed to be a tool for the benefit of consumers (through both price and innovation), and while it's not very common, every once in a while the government actually looks at that as important and steps in.
The reason for competition law is to regulate the free market to ensure that consumer choice is not limited by the uncontrolled acquisition and merger of suppliers.
The merger of NVidia and ARM is inherently non-competitive unless NVidia accepted limitations/restrictions on their licensing freedom which they are not willing to propose or accept.
That's leaving aside the international and other ramifications of a company that is involved in the entire vertical of chip production and sale through to retail having control of the licensing of the most used ISA and other IPRs that are available to its competitors throughout that vertical.
I guess the other option is to list it on some stock exchange.
NVIDIA, on the other hand, is suspicious. It is in their interest to use and manipulate ARM to release/restrict products in such a way that will strengthen their already strong market position with accelerators, and push down its competitors like AMD and Intel.
I'd rather Nvidia be kept away from Arm at all costs.
They don’t need to collude, they’ll “compete” by siting on their ass like Intel did, barely being better yet jacking up the price, only “Haswell” is renamed “Zen 3”.
> monopoly
Pick one?
If the standard is "they don't compete against each other now, but would be disincentivized to compete against each other in the future," that could be used as a rationale to block literally every merger.
Don't you threaten me with a good time. Imagine, companies actually forced to collaborate via the ordinary mechanism of contract arrangements rather than by assimilation into a horrifying megaconglomerate.
The problem is when some companies form a cartel of sort (with our without contracts) anyway. The same way Intel was not licensing x86, but since AMD already had it they were both incentivized to keep users on x86 and keep arm out.
(Of course the nvidia-arm acquisition is more about nvidia trying to build an army, oh pardon, portfolio. As Intel and AMD already have. They acquired Mellanox, plus they have GPUs and CUDA chips. Intel and Apple kind of have everything of course. AMD has Radeon, but AMD is probably still trying to catch up financially. There's also Qualcomm with their snapdragons and modems. And there are probably others, but the important thing is that snapdragons are arm based. And while selling high-end ML and gamer/miner cards is certainly not bad, but nvidia is probably trying to expand into a different market too, let's say high-volume but older semi tech.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_mergers_and_ac...
CVS buying Aetna was a particularly sick joke.
You know why? Because working with Nvidia has become such a pain in the ass. That it's better just to do it yourself.
They charge you 10x for a gpu that's a little better than their consumer GPU but won't sell you the consumer GPU because they want you to pay 10x.
Now they will definitely do the same with ARM licensing.
A while back they made a change to the terms of the GeForce driver, barring it from deployment in datacenters except for blockchain processing.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/nvidia-updates-ge...
That's an honest question, I can't fully recall.
They need their datacenter GPU numbers to look good at the end of the Q, they can't do that when all they are selling are 3090 that are perfectly fine to train the majority of AI models.
Even though that would hurt me businesswise I would happily sign for that future. And while we're at it: make it illegal for one company to hold shares in another. Just natural persons holding shares in companies would be fine.
It would make it impossible for governments to own minority stakes in local subsidiaries of global corporations to veto some things. It would make it impossible to impose capital requirements on subsidiaries of big financial institutions. It would be impossible for larger competitors to rescue failing peers and keep them operating as a going concern.
And it would very likely create the most suffocating oligopolies on a national level as well as on an industry level as competitors would find it extremely hard to enter markets with entrenched incumbents if the only way to do it was to build from scratch.
So? That would enable local companies that occupy the same niche to do so. All these multinationals are not necessarily a good thing.
> It would make it impossible for governments to own minority stakes in local subsidiaries of global corporations to veto some things.
Only if you believe that those local subsidiaries should exist in the first place and that need not be the case.
> It would make it impossible to impose capital requirements on subsidiaries of big financial institutions.
There would be no such subsidiaries.
> It would be impossible for larger competitors to rescue failing peers and keep them operating as a going concern.
These could be structured as asset sales. And a whole lot of trickery that causes these peers to fail would go out the window.
You are making the mistake of looking at the glass 'half empty', when in fact the better way to look at it is what we would get for it in return. Capitalism, but with a much more direct link between UBO and the companies they have a hand in, far less opportunity for nation state level wealth to end up concentrated with a very small number of people and less opportunity for companies to play shell games with their income.
Capitalism, like money is a great invention. But like everything else when taken to extremes it is a net negative, in moderation it could well be uniformly good. But the whole externalization game needs to stop or it will harm us greatly.
All failing companies should be liquidated and sold off in bits and pieces, employees fired, contracts and debts voided, pension schemes closed.
Entrenched local incumbents could only ever be disrupted by individuals starting new companies, funded exclusively by other individuals. Presumably, none of these individuals would be allowed to own a controlling stake in another company, otherwise it would effectively be one company.
You would have to convince those wealthy individuals to start companies in small countries in spite of the fact that the growth potential of their company would be far more limited than if they started a company in a big country. The only incentive would be local protectionism.
You would also have to make sure that companies don't enter into contractual relationships that effectively make them act as one (such as McDonald's franchises)
You would effectively hand absolute power to local family clans and oligarchs closely intertwined with local bureaucrats and politicians. It's a recipe for stagnation and corruption.
This is not a glass half full and it's not moderation. It's a glass smashed in an act of vandalism and blind rage. It's the sort of revolution that countries take a century to recover from.
Turning the clocks back a couple of centuries is not progressive either.
No, that's not what I'm saying, besides that could be easily covered through employment law, but we already have the concept of internationally operating free-lancers.
> or do anything else across borders that requires a legal entity that can be locally regulated, taxed and held accountable.
Not if that legal entity is going to have a company as its shareholders. But there would be no reason why it could not exist and have natural persons as its shareholders, they could even be the same shareholders as in some other company abroad.
You are still arguing about this from the perspective of everything that it can't do, which is pretty easy to deal with because most of those things it can do. What it can't do is to hide the UBOs, which is really the only big change. Everything else can easily be worked around.
No, I also told you what I think it would do. Create a corrupt local oligarchy that is extremely hard to disrupt. It would create a mediocre, low productivity, stagnant economy shaped by the most extreme form of protectionism I have ever heard of.
>Everything else can easily be worked around.
Your use of the word "easy" for something that would require a root and branch redesign of company law, tax law, employment law, competition law and scores of other laws in every country on earth tells me that you really haven't thought this through. Not to speak of changing the ownership structure of tens of thousands of existing companies.
I don't know many individual directly handling shares with the exchange and the settlement. How do you avoid the enormous volume of trading that happen due to retirement account reuse for shorting ? Would you forbid that too, removing the incentive for company to be honest because nobody can short anymore ?
Try it this way: How many other companies are likely to compete with them in the future? If the answer is a thousand, the loss of potential competition is not very significant. If the answer is less than ten, it is.
The U.S. government isn't a monolith. FTC is charged with, first and foremost, maintaining our markets.
Allowing nVidia to become a monopoly would bite the US in the ass strategically, as nVidia loses incentive to innovate.
That's how the US, effectively, ended up having no viable aircraft when it entered WWI, after being the country that invented the thing. (Wright and Curtiss, IIRC, locked the market with patents).
Or, more closely, how the US telecom/Internet infrastructure is atrocious, despite — and because of — the Internet and the telephone being invented here. Go figure, Ma Bell wasn't the bees knees.
Strategically, the US needs someone to keep nVidia up on their toes. Innovation cuts into profit margins when you have a monopoly.
Nvidia is reasltically already a monopoly with CUDA. They don’t need to innovate and they force universities to use their more expensive GPUs.
But not the other baby bells, which is the point. Also, Apple went to Cingular after being rebuffed by Verizon. (Apple wanted no crapware. Verizon said no.) Competition working.
Because both of these are provably false.
As is that nVidia is already a monopoly.
Anti monopoly laws are useless, x86-64 is a duopoly, and any monopoly laws aren’t able to stop Amazon and their vertical intergration, because the argument is that eBay and other sites exist. Network oligarchs collaborate to fix prices.
Natural monopolies are things like electric power grid and water supply and train and roads, they last forever precisely because they are natural and they were never leapfrogged in history. 'Natural" part stands for nessesary inveatment in infrastructure being redundant and causing zero-sum game.
Kodak wasn't much of a monopoly and certainly wasn't a natural one
Read up on how antitrust actually works, your assesment of USPS is equally inaccurate
The USPS is required to deliver to everyone, even when it doesn't make monetary sense to do so. They are an important piece of US infrastructure.
They are also incredibly constrained by legislation. They aren't allowed to just raise prices as needed.
Also we kinda want to keep territories like Alaska inhabited because geopolitics.
And we kinda want the people living in those places to be able to get their official government documents (driver licenses, court notices, etc).
Then there's this idea of voting by mail, which isn't something that should be a privilege, but that's too complex for our discussion.
To translate one of the reasons for USPS into words you may understand: you know how two-factor authentication requires that second factor? The USPS provides a means for the gov to get that second factor into the hands of the people.
A third party would be a man-in-the-middle.
So consiser USPS a part of the government's 2FA infrastructure and messaging system with SLA and proof of delivery.
That, unlike your company's authentication infrastructure, happens to pay for itself.
> The agency is burdened by hundreds of billions of dollars in debt and falling revenue, and Congress and the White House have signaled an unwillingness to grant more funding without major restructuring, lawmakers say.
> The law envisioned the Postal Service as a self-sustaining agency whose revenue could cover the expenses associated with an aging workforce involved in a physical occupation: delivering packages and parcels to every address in the country.
> Not even two decades later, it can’t. The Postal Service has racked up $160.9 billion in debt from what’s owed prepaying retiree benefits. On top of that, it has many years’ worth of operating deficits, as its top revenue generators no longer covered the costs of delivering the mail.
Then why do they need bailouts? Are these bailouts self funding? What money gave them that credit when they were long unsustainable? This is an unnatural monopoly that doesn’t allow competitors and also is a failure who mostly delivers worthless physical spam you cannot escape.
Because unlike any other company or agency, they are required to prepay retiree benefits.
Anyway, you might be surprised to hear that our Army and Navy aren't self-sustaining. Obviously, we should cut their funding and see how they manage to make their nukes pay for themselves. /s
If you don't get the difference between 401K and what the USPS was required to provide, you are deliberately obtuse, and are arguing in bad faith.
>The USPS already uses private carriers for remote places.
It's the other way around. I guess that settles the "if" in the above.
They're constantly innovating, and have monthly software releases. Don't blame NVIDIA because AMD can't offer a solid enterprise offering that is attractive to customers.
My totally uninformed opinion is that basically the only IP law that's worth a damn is trademarks (which should absolutely be very strongly enforced. It's crucially important that consumers know who they're buying from for the market to work properly), and maybe copyright on /entertainment/ focused creative works for the life of the author and no longer.
All "developing" nations don't (and shouldn't) GAF about IPRs during that phase in their development. Notice that China didn't GAF for years, but does now, both from a control POV and from a competition POV.
Countries only worry about IPRs when they have sufficient IP development to have something to sell.
That being said, nVidia is currently not playing in ARM's space, so it's hard to argue that this acquisition will harm US consumers or raise prices for them. Hence my feeling is that this is politically motivated, at least to some extent.
Also, we (the US) are entering a period of intense competition with China that may last decades and may even include acts of war. Semiconductors are a key area of competition. More US control of key semiconductor assets is in the US interest. However to be totally fair that doesn't typically concern anti-trust law. But it should concern the current administration and drive some of these decisions about where to focus. It would be very different if this was about social networks and funny cat gifs.
Huh? They currently use arm designs in the Nintendo switch and their own shield line. They also utilize them in their mellanox Ethernet adapters and network switches. What makes you believe that won't give them a reason to increase prices for competitors that also use ARM chips, if not outright refuse to grant them a license?
Look who ARM licenses to and what sort of products those clients manufacture. They are in direct competition right now in a number of areas.
If it is the FTC's actual position that the deal would harm consumers or the industry as a whole, it's certainly admirable that they would ostensibly prioritize that over US strategic interests.
This makes me wonder if their analysis shows that the merger would do sufficient harm within the industry as to actually run counter to US interests. If ARM is shaping up to become a pillar of the Western world/economy while China and its sphere of influence consolidate around RISC-V, then anything that harms Arm's market position is also a geopolitical risk to the West. The US government pushing for such a merger, at a time when China is investing heavily in semiconductor manufacturing capabilities while eyeing a conquest of Taiwan/TSMC, would therefore be shooting itself in the foot. Better to grow the pie than risk blowing it up for a slightly larger slice.
This is some seriously flawed thinking extremely convenient for corporate interests. Mixing up marlets with national security leads to the kind of atrocities that make totalitarian states proud.
"Coca-Cola Co.'s Colombian bottlers are working with death squads to kill, threaten and intimidate plant workers,"
The also FTC contends that ARM induces competitive behavior in Nvidia. And a merger would stifle that competition.
Additionally, and probably most importantly, the FTC contends that Nvidia's competition shares sensitive information with ARM. And part of what Nvidia is looking for with this acquisition is this information. I suspect this is the true reason behind the lawsuit; there's probably a good bit of industry support behind it.
Personally, I'd rather ARM be owned by a massive American firm. And out of all the American firms who would be interested in ARM, Nvidia is the most likely to continue to innovate, rather than merely engage in rent seeking behavior.
Massive firms are not an inherent Good Thing. There are some benefits due to their ability to invest, but there are also multiple downsides to conglomerates, particularly in strategically vital industries and areas.
The alternative would be to go public again. But I think the temptation is too great, and some massive company would take it over. ARM is the kind of company which is much more valuable as a part of a conglomerate than it is as an independent company.
It's worth noting ARM Ltd is a British company currently owned by a Japanese company. The U.K. and Japan are two of the closest, if not the closest, defense and industrial partners the U.S. enjoys. And unlike many U.S. allies, they're more-or-less close by choice. IOW, there's a deep reservoir of trust across the spectrum--military, legal, political. Both the U.K. and Japan tend to exercise their independence far more freely than other U.S. allies precisely because of the mutual respect afforded among the three. There's much less tension and apprehension among those three than as between, say, the U.S. and France. A critical supplier like ARM being in the hands of the U.K. and/or Japan is good enough from the perspective of the U.S., absent some extraordinary complicating context.
"When Britain Nuked America....Twice!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Wx6npt421c
And this?
"U.S. satellites are being attacked every day according to Space Force general (thedrive.com)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29402923
I think its a good decision because just being dominated by US tech companies can be demoralising, besides no one has a monopoly on ideas or innovation which all develops at different rates.
And if ARM did get bought up, would this also drive other countries towards China who are developing their own CPU's? "How China plans to lead the computer chip industry" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-50287485
From a US Military perspective, you don't want to pee off your military assets/partners do you?
while you might win a little on one side of the ledger how much would you lose on the other?
The main concern voiced here is that Nvidia-Arm could get away will less research while earning more money.
That’s basically what happened when Wintel was at peak and there was no viable alternative to Intel chips. They didn’t bring incredible innovation from the ungodly amount of money they gained; they just crushed all their other competitors through various means, got sued, and still made the field plateau for a decade or so before we saw real innovation.
- Intel
- AMD
- Apple
- Qualcomm
Any of them is pushing the enveloppe in some way or form, I’d argue they are “cutting-edge”
Maximizing tax revenues is not the FTC’s job.
Great way to cause a chip crises and kill our car industry, but if they keep going at this pace, soon there won't be anything left to sell.
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/326447-arm-china-seize...
As a frequently observed phenomenon, no. The intellectual property and brand which generate revenue for ARM will be held in some other country, so profits can be directed there and no tax payable in the USA.
A rather long read but it’s starting to make sense .
Remember also that "GPU" technology is not strictly about graphics.
If you browse the marketing website, listen to the keynotes, and generally learn of the NVIDIA vision of the future, it is something like this. There will be tons of little robots and similar endpoints ("edge computing"). Such a robot will be powered by a little ARM chip with an NVIDIA coprocessor for its on-board AI (computer vision, mobility, and the like). The robot will talk over 5G or one of its successors — the signal processing for the base station perhaps powered by something like NVIDIA AI-on-5G. This communication link will connect it with compute appliances in the nearest utility closet or server room, wherein NVIDIA simulation and route-planning software maintains a "digital twin" of the real world, and helps orchestrate their operations, while operators can render that model on their local machines. And all these devices will have computer-vision and route-planning models on board, models that are trained in the big machines in the datacenter.
We have a few of these systems in computing today, but AI coprocessors will become very interesting as we move deeper into this world.
It’s not even primarily about graphics anymore.
Graphics seem to be the 2nd if not 3rd most common use for GPUs.
The whole deal would have been a huge destruction of value for the sake of Jensen Huang's ego.
It would be ironic if true, because their failure to intervene has hurt America's ability to innovate and created opportunities for China.
The original ARM sale to Softbank was made while everybody was distracted by Brexit, and is regarded as somewhat of an embarrassment. However Softbank appears to have played themselves because any attempt to sell ARM to a non-British owner will likely be denied as politically unacceptable.
Softbank gets to keep a cool $1.25 billion in cash from Nvidia if the deal falls through. It's standard M&A practice and so a win-win situation for them.
Nvidia would gain unprecedented information on its competitors businesses.
- sales volumes for all arm based products
- plans to license arm cores for new designs
- some details of new designs - eg possibly process technology etc
Nvidia's entire business and philosophy regarding their chip designs are kind of antithetical to what ARM was achieving.
You should expect the following manufacturers to have good mainline support:
https://www.linaro.org/membership/
I am sure your mileage will vary between vendors (I am pretty sure Qualcomm was NOT one of the founding members, but it's there now), but this at least signals an investment of money and resources.
But everything else has changed around them. The quality of other drivers has improved, the linux ecosystem and what it expects out of drivers has changed, and the nvidia windows drivers have gotten features that the nvidia linux drivers don't.
It's very foggy in my mind, so I might be misremembering details.
Nvidia are finally moving to support GBM (iirc, it's because someone from KDE asked an nvidia engineer to help get something working with wayland+eglstreams, and he found out it was impossible, as the community had been saying for a while. Slight citation needed on that as I can't find a reference).
Technically they have support in their latest 495 drivers, but I can speak from experience when I say it's not seamless for a user. (I have put a lot of effort into getting it to work and it recently broke again).
[0] https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/10/nvidia-beta-4952905-ro...
It's an incredibly frustrating experience, and I really wonder if nvidia realises the long-term impact they're having by alienating the tech crowd (i.e. the ones that give recommendations to friends, and decide what hardware their companies will buy).
It may be because, in practice, NVIDIA looks at the size of us all... and yawns because we're tiny and because most tech reviewers still recommend them and most gamers still buy them. And they have a point - AMD has better Linux support, but NVIDIA's got CUDA (which has basically killed OpenCL and AMD's ROCm is less than a proof of concept in quality), DLSS, Raytracing, much better video encoders, a bunch of stuff that people are willing to put up with subpar Linux for.
It wasn’t better before what you think Nvidia will do either. Look at the state of Linux kernel updates on ARM chips.
Why are you defending this deal so ferociously?
Please point me to good open ARM processor manufacturers that uploads good Linux updates, I’ll be happy to be wrong that the Jetson really isn’t the best.
"Good manufacturers" today contribute directly to the upstream kernel, and frequently through Linaro kernel trees first.
Rockchip has a number of differently performing chips (RK3399Pro seems to perform well in comparison with Jetson: https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/05/15/toybrick-rk3399pro-b..., https://www.seeedstudio.com/blog/2019/12/05/rk3399pro-vs-ras...). Pine only recently introduced a RK3399-based board (non-Pro, basically lacking an NPU) version, so you might want to go with them for availability reasons.
Apple could move to RISC-V (over another two decades), but even if they did, their move wouldn't actually benefit the RISC-V community (and moreover, they'd probably just do their own ISA; at ultra-vertically integrated gigacorporation scale, why not?)
Samsung & Qualcomm? What's the assertion, that Nvidia would let ARM's ISA languish so much they'd be forced to move? Hasn't Qualcomm already been doing that, just with the actual chips; and no one seems to care? Except the people who run iPhone vs Android benchmarks of course.
RISC-V adoption will be driven by the capability of RISC-V and it being a competitive choice compared to ARM and others. NVIDIA acquiring ARM wouldn't spark RISC-V, it would reduce ARM adoption.
Neither is a good outcome.
Well that ship has sailed, as ARM is owned by the Japanese Softbank now.
Previously, it was a UK firm, and now the UK is trying to introduce legislation to prevent this from happening again.
ARM was UK's "oh shit" moment. That influenced their move to declare nuclear weapons industry "public domain", i.e. nationalize it:
https://www.upi.com/Defense-News/2020/11/02/Britain-to-natio...
The rest are pretty much made in Russia.
Makes you ponder the implications of existence of the privately owned military-industrial complex, huh.
> Don’t Bank on the bomb identifies the following companies as producers of key components for the French nuclear weapons arsenal:
> Airbus Group (the Netherlands),
> BAE Systems (United Kingdom),
> Leonardo (Italy),
> Safran (France), and
> Thales (France)
(Neither of which has anything to do with nukes directly)
Which isn't incorrect but misleading. There are two French nuclear-capable missiles (ASMPA and M51, for air and submarine launches respectively) and one warhead ( TNA). ASMPA is a cruise missile designed by MBDA (which is the successor to government-owned missile companies), M51 was mostly designed by the military with some parts subcontracted to various subcontractors like MBDA, Safran, Thales, etc.
However, the nuclear warheads themselves are designed by a government-owned company, CEA, and everything nuclear related in France is at least majority government owned.
Nuclear weapon delivery systems have been the most important part even since the first ever atomic bomb. The B-29 Superfortress that dropped the bombs on Japan cost about 1.5x as much as the Manhattan Project to develop[1].
Every discussion of arsenals I've seen focuses on delivery more than warheads [2][3].
Additionally, I can't speak for France, but in the US, the warheads are produced/refurbished in government-owned, privately managed and operated facilities. That's to say, the likes of Lockheed-Martin, Northtrop Grumman and Honeywell have all the operational knowledge and access, but technically Pantex is government-owned.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_B-29_Superfortress
[2]https://sipri.org/sites/default/files/2021-06/yb21_10_wnf_21...
[3]https://programs.fas.org/ssp/nukes/publications1/Article2012...
Uh, how about this: NVIDIA raises the licensing fees substantially. NVIDIA won’t have to pay the licensing fee if they own Arm, which would expand their profit margin at the expense of Arm licensees, and raise prices for consumers.
Or they could refuse to license Arm IP to current licensees.
Both of these scenarios are pretty obvious.
Not if the intention was good or bad.
[0]: https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/arbitra...
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/06/lina-khans-bat...
When will they remember them in cases of disruptive growth like Google and Amazon and do AT&T?
Edit: So much so, that I would almost start my defense with claiming that the FTC's charges are in bad-faith.
https://www.xda-developers.com/android-project-mainline-modu...
While I can guess what the collective market is thinking, it's anybody's guess. If you disagree, then short Nvidia?
I, for example, don't agree with Tesla's current valuation but I wouldn't be stupid enough to try to compete with Musk's memeing on Twitter.
>The FTC’s complaint alleges that the combined firm would have the means and incentive to stifle innovative next-generation technologies, including those used to run datacenters and driver-assistance systems in cars.
and here:
>According to the complaint, the acquisition will harm competition in three worldwide markets in which Nvidia competes using Arm-based products:
>High-Level Advanced Driver Assistance Systems for passenger cars. These systems offer computer-assisted driving functions, such as automated lane changing, lane keeping, highway entrance and exit, and collision prevention;
I wonder if this action is related to the automotive chip shortage concerns in any way.
It also is a major US industry so that enables the FTC to describe in the court cases the impact on competition outside of the specific chip design/manufacture industry.
There has never been a good open ARM processor for mobile computing ever, the Jetson is the best open one while the Apple chips and M1 is the technically best one.
How many non-Arm mobile processors are there?
Plus Apple M1.
Arm ISA does not need Nvidia for a ‘kick in the rear’.
> If ARM, inc. or Softbank were interested in high-powered chips, either of these companies would have done it by now. But they haven't.
Just factually incorrect given what is happening at the moment with Neoverse.
(And Ampere Computing not the Nvidia GPU design)
Why doesn’t the SoC mention APUs but mentions Intel CULV? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_on_a_chip
The FTC should be doing its job but it should be doing it the proper way - not just delaying the deal until it falls apart. It should also do its job promptly... the UK was looking at this deal nearly a year ago - that should have been a huge flag to accelerate their own investigation. What's the point of wasting months of people's time and money.
Two factors here: ARM isn’t a U.S. company, and neither the U.K. nor U.S. would seem to have a great deal of leverage to bring to bear on the situation, realistically.
Our grand-children will hate us for being cowards and short-sighted profiteers.
https://www.wionews.com/world/joe-bidens-son-helped-china-ge...
Or, 40 billion to force the market to agree on a new ISA a little sooner than it would have naturally? Smart play. It's nice job security for the engineers that are going to need to port everything, though...
MIPS just got long in the tooth and died because the company (Wave Computing) that was licensing MIPS designs just didn't have enough customers. They have now switched to RISC-V.
[1] In general terms, I know it has (had?) a few niches like routers (IIRC).
Which other companies beyond NVIDIA sell DPUs ?
ARM alone is way too powerful
Obviously it's still worth something, it's just that the valuation becomes really fuzzy except for the assets.
Particularly for a lower-dividend, higher growth company like Nvidia, the vast majority of the present value comes from the terminal value (what someone else will pay you for it when you're done holding the investment), made even more extreme by low interest rates.
This is cigarette-butt investing. It ignores terminal value. If the terminal value is already close to zero, it's the right move, an orderly wind-down and re-allocation of assets. If there is terminal value, it's a pillaging. Cases like these, where the terminal value starts looking more theoretical than practical, are how those incentives shift.
Coca-Cola has no reason to "terminate" itself, so why shouldn't it distribute profit excess to its operating requirements back to shareholders?
There is an simple model in finance [1] that collapses an infinitely growing stream of cash flows into a finite present value. So to your example of coca-cola, even if you assume they will exist and distribute growing profits forever, you can still find a terminal value.
[1]: https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/va...
First, it's at least possible that some government agencies actually do care about their charters and don't make it 100% about any one-sided geopolitical advantages. It's not hard to see how this deal will be bad for American consumers and businesses at large, and the FTC's purpose is to prevent that harm.
But more than that, even if you do take the position that they only care about realpolitik, the US government's desire to reign in big tech is about the sole thing that has bipartisan support. This action is well in line with keeping big tech from usurping the power of government.
I am having a hard time understanding this. Care to explain rather than sidestepping and calling out my comment as overly simplistic? It seems the FTC is acting to protect businesses (ironically other big tech), not consumers. That’s what I don’t get.
> This action is well in line with keeping big tech from usurping the power of government.
“It’s political” isn’t really an explanation either. There’s certainly something to discuss about at what point a company becomes too big and valuable, but that doesn't seem to be the stated motivation here. And I’d be interested in understanding what the framework is for applying those restrictions and how e.g. a company like Apple slid by without getting dismantled.
EDIT: To put my confusion another way, at the end it says “The FTC acts when it has reason to believe the law has been or is being violated.” What law has allegedly been violated or would be violated should this merger succeed?
When a downstream firm merges with an upstream supplier that is really important to the downstream firm and its competitors, the merged firm can competitively hobble the downstream competitors. They can refuse to sell the upstream good to competitors, or raise the cost for competitors. Plus it may force the competitors (or potential new entrants) to vertically integrate themselves and enter both the downstream and upstream markets, which chills competition in the downstream market. The government also credits business justifications for the merger, and in the end they balance those with the potential harms to competition.
The article (I can't find the complaint) also says, and this is a typical vertical merger concern, that this will give Nvidia (the downstream firm) access to sensitive information of Nvidia's rivals that they had previously shared with Arm.
EDIT: There is also a general antitrust push in the Biden administration, notably in the appointments of Lina Khan and Tim Wu. Interesting to see its fruits.
Somehow reminds me of when the SEC decided that Nvidia was the next Enron back in the 00s because a few of their employees did some piddly insider trading and they spent the next two to three years trying to destroy the company. In the end, earnings were adjusted up 10 million and they got rid of their CFO as a sacrificial lamb. All these government bureaucrats need to look busy after all.
I'm not sure if you're saying that Intel and AMD existing means that competition is doing fine, but three actors is a highly concentrated market.
NVidia's competition in the hardware acceleration space often includes ARM cores for management (e.g., the Xilinx Zynq https://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/soc/zynq-700... ), or are extension of the ARM instruction set (e.g. AWS's Graviton https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/ ).
RISC-V suppliers (e.g, SiFive) is the closest thing that ARM to has to a competitor here, and they're nowhere near the same scale.
Which is to say it seems odd that the FTC would get its hackles up over a case as nichey as you describe. it would seem the elephant in the room is Nvidia's dominance of AI. There's nothing stopping AMD or Intel developing equivalent SoCs. In fact one of the cases you mentioned comes from Xilinx ergo AMD.
So I have to think this has to be something as basic as slinging mud at their dominance of AI. Something as simple as trying to exclude competing browsers from your operating system's desktop. Something as understandable as trying to exclude third parties from collecting money on your mobile platform. And since both other cases are larger more general instances of dominance, it's curious they aren't being investigated as well. Well not really, there's probably a lot of grift here.
But if we're going to worry about a single party having dominance of AI then we have to start asking questions about Google and Facebook controlling the major interfaces to AI. Sure, they are open source, you can fork them if you like. But they get to control all the pull requests into the master branch. That lets them control how well any one platform runs their framework. That seems a bit anti-competitive as well when at least one of the parties has their own AI hardware.
There was significant insider trading occurring due to an internal email about the Xbox deal. 10 employees and 15 people total.
"The Securities and Exchange Commission has sued 15 people, including the 10 suspended nVidia employees, accusing them of insider trading in shares of the graphics chipmaker based on advance information that it would win a lucrative contract from Microsoft Corp." [1]
In a separate incident, nVidia wanted to show better quarterly results and tried to pressure their supplier to reduce costs, with the promise of paying more in the future. Their supplier wanted it in writing. The CFO knew they could not have such an explicit agreement in writing, as it would not allow them to write down the cost savings for the quarter, so they directed an employee to author two separate agreements to obfuscate their mutual nature.
"We can not sign this or have this in print. Will wipe out the credit in Q1. Need to arrange this separately and trust us to abide by it." [2]
Seems kind of in the purview of the SEC to look into these kinds of things.
But thanks for pointing out why they got rid of the CFO. I didn't know about that part. It makes more sense now.
The punitive remediation for the insider traders was done due to the SEC investigating, which then lead to discovery of the accounting issue. Your characterization that the SEC had a vendetta against nVidia is completely wrong. Maybe nVidia should have had tighter controls on privileged information and better insider trading education for their employees. Maybe they also shouldn't have tried to cook their books to deceive the market. If it really was only a puny $1.7M and didn't really matter, why'd they do it? CORRECTION: $1.7M was profits by the insider traders, nVidia misstated $3.3 million in cost savings.
As for the inside trading employees, they were fools. Good luck keeping out fools like that once you have a hundred or more employees or why do some googlers stalk their ex partner's search histories? Why do some Amazon employees snoop on Alexa recordings? Why do some Facebook employees look at the private friends list of their ex partners? Etc. There was a second insider trading investigation in 2014 that was handled quietly and efficiently unlike this fiasco. That one seemed a bit more nefarious and systematic IMO and yet no one compared it to Enron. Funny that.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/nvidia-sec-accounting-prob...
Did 2014 involve accounting discrepancies? Did the SEC still release a public press release like they did in the 2000s? Their handling wasn't much different here. Enron was long dead by 2014 and it doesn't look like there was wrongdoing by nVidia directly, so obviously the media wouldn't make such comparisons.
Digital privacy concerns don't directly involve the SEC, though maybe the FTC. That's another topic, but one worthy of competent regulatory oversight.
And that the SEC finding a small accounting discrepancy so as to justify the time they put into this investigation is actually an Enron level event?
Got it. We see things differently. You think I'm downplaying what happened. I think you're overstating it just like the media compared them to Enron.
Just because Enron had massive fraud doesn't make $3.3 million "a small discrepancy", nor is purposefully doing something merely a discrepancy or oversight.
No one compared the insider trading to Enron. The actual accounting issue got them those comparisons.
"U.S. technology giants face a new wave of scrutiny from antitrust officials, as the Federal Trade Commission demanded information about their acquisitions of startups that may have eliminated emerging competitors. The FTC issued orders to Alphabet’s Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon.com and Microsoft for information on the terms and purposes of transactions they closed from the beginning of 2010 through 2019, the agency said Tuesday."
I'm guessing "the law" is probably the Sherman Antitrust Act, which is still on the books, though enforcement went out of fashion in the 1980s. Seems to be making a comeback, though.
> This is Lina Khan’s first major merger challenge. It is also a unanimous vote, and ironically, not all that bad for some of the key players in big tech.
I think this key point is telling… Big tech has a big hold on our political-think. And even Matt seems to have conflicting thoughts.
* mergers and acquisitions where the effect may substantially lessen competition
This is my bone. I don't understand how this merger substantially lessens competition. Let's all concede the merger is obviously bad for every single business in the US and there is nothing redeemable about Nvidia and no reason to believe it should own ARM IP. They're still not competitors and no competition in the market has been lessened by such a merger. In fact, access to other people's sensitive business details probably makes things more competitive and forces participants to innovate in other areas. Only day to day contract negotiation has become shittier because now you have deal with "shitty" Nvidia. Where's the law that says companies can't vertically integrate? Is there a precedent for blocking these type of vertical mergers solely because it might be good business for the acquirer and unfortunate news for other participants? Why couldn't other participants put a bid out on ARM? Why can't Apple and Google just throw 100 billion at SoftBank and say we're buying and freeing ARM? Idk maybe I was simply born into an age of spineless non-enforcement of anti-trust, but I'm not seeing how this scenario warrants more scrutiny than "normal".
Your intuition is right in that vertical mergers are viewed less suspiciously than mergers between competitors. But courts still assess the impact to competition in vertical mergers. As you did, assume the worst case: if Arm is really crucial to Nvidia's competitors, and the merged firm keeps Arm's designs to themselves, competition in chip-supply is harmed. Yes, Nvidia was savvy etc. and is just doing what another actor could do, but compare this method of Nvidia beating their competitors versus the "ideal" way where Nvidia makes a better product, does it cheaper, and is generally more efficient. That's what antitrust law wants. It wants the merits of the product and the org to decide the winner in a market, not things like buying Arm and keeping them to yourself.
Step 1: acquire ARM
Step 2: make life more difficult for other ARM license holders and/or easier for NVidia
Step 3: be the only viable supplier of ARM chips
I'm not seeing how this scenario warrants more scrutiny than "normal".
Speculating: maybe the old "normal" was too low, this was just the easiest first move, and other more difficult antitrust moves are in the pipeline.
They already have killed off any effective competition, and that's a bad thing. If x86 was more diverse and was moving toward the current set of two, blocking it would also be good.
At least the important parts are falling out of patent...
> In reality if we stop this merger what we're saying is that it's a problem for any company to own IP that they license to competitors while at the same time producing and selling an in-house product that leverages the same IP.
Well it is. How much of a problem depends on how much competition the different parts of the market have.
Still, you raise a good point. Maybe along with blocking more mergers, we should be looking at breaking some companies up.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29423870
I'm by no means an attorney but the argument made seems sound.
Anyway I can't help but feel the argument is pretty loose on demonstrating that Nvidia would be in a position to harm the market in a substantial way. Usually the law is enforced reactively to punish bad/unwanted behavior. We preemptively prevent mergers that would result in no real competition existing in a market, in other words: a monopoly. We do that because it's bad for consumers. You can echo the FTC's statements about how having leverage over other market participants might be harmful all you want, but the reality is that they don't explain how Nvidia owning ARM creates a monopoly (is akin to something like Intel owning ARM) and then how that is inherently bad for fundamentally bad for consumers. Nvidia owning arm looks like savvy business at best and at worst annoying and disruptive to some people who put most of their eggs in the ARM basket. I see how it could in theory have an effect on some competition to have this type of vertical integration happen, but is that substantial to the point of Nvidia being a monopoly on microprocessors and consumers left abused and holding the bag? That's quite the claim.
AMD competes with Intel and Intel is similarly vertically integrated. AMD even makes graphics cards after merging with ATI and that didn't kill any markets or harm consumers, if anything AMD graphics has become more competitive. Intel is entering the graphics card space. Personally I'd love to see another player in the processor space. Right now it's Intel and AMD and now Apple. Why wouldn't an Nvidia N2 ARM SOC that competes with the Apple M1 be a good thing? IDK I see potential consumer benefits to Nvidia being able to run with ARM. I can't help but feel like we're straining here under the guise of "big tech is big and bad let's punish them all".
Anyway probably at the end of the utility of going back an forth on wether the merger substantially lessens competition to the point of causing consumer harm. We'll see what the courts decide.
It's one case out of many where suddenly a defacto market leader emerges with almost no room for other entrants, whereas at least without the merger device makers can source silicon from arm licensors as well as from AMD, NVDA, and INTC (soon-ish) for solid graphics components.
the Bell System was broken up in the 1980s
So yeah, I guess I'd argue that NVidia is more dangerous because they're more competent. In the sense that they are competent because they are in a close enough market for there to be a conflict of interest.
Should Nvidia own ARM, the avenues for exploitation aren't just obvious, but anticipated.
It's kind of a team project, isn't it? The links between the two go pretty deep.
[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/06/lina-khans-bat...
[2]: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/05/08/ftc-chairman-congr...
As an European I'm increasingly bullish on China and see the US and EU as self-sabotaging neurotic entities.
TSMC and Nvidia are not in the same business.
There's no guarantee that Chine will "takeover" Taiwan any time soon, the geo-politics of that are way more enormous than just chip manufacture.
Most of the development in manufacturing of chips is by the companies that supply the fab developers, the integration of those skills and components is where the different fab owners have their competitive advantages.
The "future when the US/EU can't produce our own chips" was also in the 80s when there was a push to develop memory manufacturers and back then, Japan was the evil empire that needed to be stopped.
TSMC would continue post a China takeover of Taiwan.
Wut? How is NVIDIA keeping new ARM designs from competitors like Intel, AMD and phone manufacturers helping to win the "chip race"?
There are plenty of people lining up against NVidia on this.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/14/qualcomm-offers-to-invest-in...
Well that's not what your link says
It does seem like the next 100 years is just more of what's been going on the past decade and it seems pretty grim for the customer and great for the corporations as they duke it out with each other much like what this seems to really be about.
The UK is already investigating as well, see https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/16/22785832/nvidias-arm-acq...
The EU is also investigating: https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/27/22266504/nvidia-arm-deal...
Any one of these regulators can both delay and/or stop and/or change the conditions of the proposed merger.
It's highly likely that any other direct acquisition of ARM would get the same investigation, no matter who the acquirer is.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/13/britain-to-protect-tech-firm...