LONDON (Reuters) – Britain said on Monday it would intervene in SoftBank’s sale of chip designer ARM Holdings to U.S. group Nvidia on national security grounds, and had requested a report on the implications of the $40 billion deal.
Digital Secretary Oliver Dowden said: “Following careful consideration of the proposed takeover of ARM, I have today issued an intervention notice on national security grounds.
“As a next step and to help me gather the relevant information, the UK’s independent competition authority will now prepare a report on the implications of the transaction, which will help inform any further decisions.”
The deal, which was announced in September, puts a vital supplier to multiple silicon chip makers under the control of a single player, generating pushback from regulators and rivals to Nvidia, the biggest U.S. chip company by market capitalisation.
ARM, which was founded and is still based in Cambridge, England, does not make chips but has created an instruction set architecture on which it bases designs for computing cores.
Its chip designs and technology is licensed to customers like Qualcomm Inc, Apple and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd .
(Reporting by Paul Sandle; Editing by Kate Holton)
