Nvidia’s huge deal with SoftBank has been called off. Nvidia makes computer-processing things, and is one of the biggest companies in the world. Nvidia chips are used in a lot of computers and electronic devices. Nvidia was going to buy the chip (a computer chip, not the eating kind) company ARM, which is owned by Softbank, a Japanese based company. Nvidia was going to give Softbank $40 billion dollars for ARM. The reason this deal has failed is because of regulatory concerns.
Many regulators around the world didn’t want this deal to happen, because Nvidia would receive too much power over the chip market, which could make it a monopoly. A monopoly is a company that has too much power in its industry. For example, AT&T was a monopoly in the past. It erased all competition from that industry, so AT&T could control all prices and customers would have to buy its products, because they couldn’t get it from anyone else. The government finally split AT&T up into smaller companies. Long story short, because of those breakups, two modern day big companies were formed – AT&T and Verizon.
When this deal was first announced in 2020, it was expected to happen within the next 18 months, but it stopped, obviously due to concerns. Nvidia already paid $1.25 billion to Softbank as a deposit when the deal was announced, and Softbank gets to keep that extra money. Softbank bought ARM four years before the deal was announced, for $32 billion. For this deal to happen, it would have to be approved in the US, UK, EU (European Union), and China.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/08/tech/nvidia-arm-deal-softbank-intl-hnk/index.html
