Nvidia says Arm deal allows it a new world of opportunity

arm nvidia
(Image credit: Nvidia)

Ever since its $40bn acquisition of Arm from SoftBank last month, Nvidia has been excited about how the move will help strengthen it for the “age of AI”, the company's CEO has said.

In a conversation with Chairman and CEO of SoftBank, Masayoshi Son, Jensen Huang shared further details about his vision for the Nvidia-Arm combine, stating, “The reason why combining Arm and Nvidia makes so much sense is because we can then bring Nvidia’s AI to the most popular edge CPU in the world.”

Huang described Arm as “one of the technology world’s great jewels” in his conversation with Son, adding that the “the true value of Arm is in the ecosystem of Arm — the 500 companies that use Arm today.” 

License to leverage

Arm’s business model has long been to license its designs to any chipset vendor, which has enabled it to foster a very diverse ecosystem of systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) for all kinds of applications, from gaming consoles and home appliances to drones to an army of autonomous workers and drones. 

In fact, Son said it won’t be long before the trillionth Arm-based SoC is shipped. 

During their conversation, Huang affirmed that it is this rich ecosystem at the edge that Nvidia wants to tap: “Our dream is to bring NVIDIA’s AI to Arm’s ecosystem, and the only way to bring it to the Arm ecosystem is through all of the existing customers, licensees and partners.” 

The deal for Arm is yet to be completed, with the UK government still under pressure from some sides to block the move, which critics say would sell off one of the country's few home-grown technology success stories.

Mayank Sharma

With almost two decades of writing and reporting on Linux, Mayank Sharma would like everyone to think he’s TechRadar Pro’s expert on the topic. Of course, he’s just as interested in other computing topics, particularly cybersecurity, cloud, containers, and coding.