Qualcomm's upcoming CEO Cristiano Amon has expressed an interest in a stake in ARM in an interview with the British Telegraph if the company cannot be sold to Nvidia and the current owner SoftBank offers shares to the public. A consortium of current ARM customers is to take over parts of the group.
Nvidia plans to acquire ARM for $ 40 billion and expects the acquisition to be completed early next year. For the acquisition, however, Nvidia has to overcome several regulatory hurdles in the United Kingdom, the USA, Europe and China. According to Nvidia, the neutral license model of ARM is to be retained. Nvidia, in turn, wants to expand the ARM portfolio with its own developments, such as GPU and AI technologies.
The industry sees takeover as critical
The planned takeover is viewed extremely critically in the industry, especially current licensees such as Google, Microsoft and Qualcomm have positioned themselves against it after the planned takeover was announced. Qualcomm is now talking about wanting to hold a stake in ARM if the takeover by Nvidia should fail. The future Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon, who will take over the helm from Steve Mollenkopf on June 30th after 21 years in the group, wants to acquire a stake in ARM along with other companies if the planned takeover by Nvidia fails and the current owner SoftBank loses the free float allows.
Consortium should hold ARM shares
If ARM has an independent future, many companies in the ecosystem will be very interested in investing in ARM, including Qualcomm, argued Amon in an interview with the Telegraph. The current Qualcomm President and soon-to-be CEO believes that great opportunities could arise if a consortium of current customers could invest in the company. Qualcomm is ready to take this step and has already held talks with other interested companies. According to the Telegraph, critics of Nvidia's takeover include Amazon and Tesla.
Nvidia sticks to plans
Nvidia argues – unsurprisingly – against an initial public offering (IPO) of ARM. According to a company spokesman, ARM instead needs an infusion of new technologies that ARM can pass on to licensees worldwide. One of the reasons why Nvidia decided to take over ARM. However, Nvidia is open to Qualcomm and proposes that new developments of the group flow into the ARM ecosystem.
Qualcomm develops its own ARM cores
Qualcomm took over the start-up Nuvia for 1.4 billion US dollars at the beginning of the year and wants to develop its own ARM cores for SoCs again in the future instead of licensing off-the-shelf designs from ARM. Qualcomm plans to deliver the first samples of a completely new system-on-a-chip for ARM notebooks in the high-performance segment in the second half of 2022. The SoC will rely on specially developed CPU cores with the know-how of Nuvia. Qualcomm also wants to integrate the next generation CPUs in flagship smartphones, digital cockpits and in the area of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) for cars.
Nuvia was introduced in the Founded spring 2019 by John Bruno, Manu Gulati and Gerard Williams III. Williams III, in particular, as a former Senior Director for Platform Architecture at Apple, is an authority on SoC development. Williams III was responsible for all CPU developments at Apple from 2009 to 2019 and heralded the 64-bit era of smartphones with the A7. Most recently at Apple he headed the development of the Firestorm design, which is used as a large core in the A14 Bionic and M1. Before joining Apple, Williams III held the highest position for engineers at ARM as a Fellow. Manu Gulati, in turn, was responsible for chip development at Google, and John Bruno was also active in this area.