SoftBank’s proposed sale of Arm to NVIDIA should be blocked. While there are major UK national interest concerns about this transaction, the threat and likelihood of severe anticompetitive effects are global and more fundamental. NVIDIA’s control over Arm will throttle the advance of other Arm licensees in cloud datacentres. NVIDIA will extend its ascendancy there into edge computing—as is essential in emerging 5G networks and applications like Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)—and stifle the potential for heterogeneous computing—including Central Processing Unit (CPU), Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) and Digital Signal Processor (DSP)1—in the wider ecosystem including smartphones and IoT devices.
