The other (and perhaps more immediate) challenge for NVIDIA is convincing regulators across the globe to approve the deal. NVIDIA is pitching the deal as being complementary, combining two companies that otherwise have minimal overlap. None the less, minimal is not the same as “none”, and besides the immediate and obvious overlap with Mali and GeForce GPU technologies, regulators will no doubt take a great deal of interest in the future of IP licensing. The smartphone revolution of the past decade and a half has been built on top of Arm architectures – never mind the billions of devices with Arm-based microcontrollers – so many parties have a vested interest in keeping that going.
To that end, while NVIDIA is just starting discussions with regulators – the deal was secret and not being discussed with partners nor regulators until this evening – the company is
already making concessions and guarantees to the British government to get its approval. This includes committing to keeping Arm headquartered in Cambridge, and continuing to do a significant amount of their engineering work there.