From ExtremeTech, August 5:
There are reports that the UK government may act to block Nvidia’s purchase of ARM on the basis of national security. If true, this would represent a blow to Nvidia’s long-term plans. We suspect that Team Green has planned for this eventuality and has made contingency plans if its purchase of ARM does not pan out.
The rejection — which is only rumored at this point — is based on a report compiled at the request of UK Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden. It is said to warn against allowing Nvidia to acquire ARM on the basis of national security, but Bloomberg does not specify what the precise national security concerns are. This seems relevant. We have never seen public evidence proving Huawei works or spies on foreign nations at the behest of the Chinese government (which is not the same thing as saying such evidence does not exist), but past reports have suggested the company’s data security practices were poor. Sufficiently poor security could be grounds for rejecting Huawei equipment even without deliberately bad behavior.
Nvidia is not likely to be in the same boat as Huawei where security issues are concerned. “We continue to work through the regulatory process with the U.K. government,” an Nvidia spokesperson told Bloomberg. “We look forward to their questions and expect to resolve any issues they may have.”
We doubt the national security concerns cited by the UK are anchored in specific security practices. It seems more likely (absent the full report) that this concern is based on what we’ve previously dubbed “silicon nationalism.”
During the pandemic, a number of nations awoke to the fact that semiconductor production is absolutely vital for any modern economy. TSMC’s dominance of the pure-play semiconductor manufacturing industry means it also accounts for most of the leading edge manufacturing capacity. This has made both the EU and US rather nervous, but European companies have a very different relationship with the semiconductor industry than the US does. In the EU, most commercial demand for silicon is for products that are not built on the leading edge....
....MUCH MORE
Chips: If ARM - NVIDIA Deal Is Blocked Qualcomm Prepared To Swoop In
April 23
"Nvidia’s $40 Billion Deal for Arm Faces U.K. National-Security Probe " (NVDA)
....“Our company can realize all of our hopes and dreams without Arm,” Huang explains, calling it a once in a lifetime opportunity that SoftBank wanted to sell Arm Holdings where “it was like my mind exploded, it was so good” and that it took three decades to build Arm into what it is and that “this is a team that won’t get built again” if the deal doesn’t go through....
