Nvidia will pay $1.25 billion to SoftBank for unsuccessfully securing the deal, and Arm CEO Simon Segars will be stepping down and replaced by Arm’s head of IP Rene Haas, who also used to run Nvidia’s own Arm business a few years ago.
“Segars has decided that at this stage of his career, the time and energy required to take the company public and everything around that was not something he wanted to sign up to,” Haas told TechCrunch. “So he’s going to step down. I’m going to take over for him.”
Instead, SoftBank says that Arm will pursue an initial public offering (IPO) in the fiscal year at the beginning of April.
The deal had been controversial in the UK and the EU ever since it was announced due to concerns that it may push prices up and tighten choice and innovation. In October, the European Commission opened an in-depth investigation to assess the $40 billion acquisition.
In December the US Federal Trade Commission sued in an attempt it block it from happening on antitrust grounds.
“The proposed vertical deal would give one of the largest chip companies control over the computing technology and designs that rival firms rely on to develop their own competing chips,” the FTC said.
The acquisition would have put Nvidia into even more rivalry with its competitors in the data centre chip market such as Intel and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
Arm is a core supplier of architecture technology to many semiconductor companies. The chip is at the core of almost all mobile processors powering smartphones, including Apple and Android devices that use Qualcomm chips.
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