The United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is asking NVIDIA to submit more documents as part of the competition investigation it is conducting on the $ 40 billion acquisition of ARM. This comes after competing companies made various comments to try to stop the acquisition of NVIDIA.
The FTC, the US competition body, sent a “second request” to NVIDIA, asking it to submit internal documents related to the SoftBank ARM acquisition, which was announced in September.
As we told you when this transaction was first disclosed, NVIDIA will have a number of regulatory hurdles to overcome before the deal can be finalized. The main concern is that the company may change the way the ARM licensing business is conducted, which may put its competitors at an unfair disadvantage.
Although NVIDIA has always insisted that it will maintain ARM’s current business model, the FTC finds the conflict of interest too difficult to avoid, so the deal may not materialize.
The way to finalize the agreement with ARM
The FTC is the first competition regulator NVIDIA needs to get the green light from. The company has yet to present itself in other major markets for approval. It will have to go to the European Union, the United Kingdom (Arm’s address) and China (which represents a fifth of its market), among others. The green team estimates that the regulatory process could take up to 18 months.
