With Arm priced at $40 billion, the pun was inevitable: “Somebody just said to me the other day: you paid an arm and a leg!” Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang recalled this joke during a ‘fireside chat’ with Arm’s CEO Simon Segars, on occasion of the Arm DevSummit – a developers’ conference that took place as a virtual event from October 6th to 8th. Despite the joke, Huang is happy with the deal: “[It’s] worth every penny and more,” he soon added. While we wait for updates on another big deal – AMD reportedly in advanced talk to buy Xilinx – the answers provided by Huang and Segars offer the official CEOs’ perspective on the Nvidia acquisition of Arm.
The “fireside chat” which took place during the Arm DevSummit [virtual event]. From left to right: moderator Rene Haas, Arm CEO Simon Segars, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Image credit: Arm
This deal is clearly different from most semiconductor acquisitions, usually involving two chip vendors. On the one hand, Arm is a pure-play IP licensor; on the other hand, while the business of Nvidia includes designing processor and selling chips, its technological involvement in the deal mainly concerns its AI software capabilities. “We’re going to be able to bring our capability to the Arm ecosystem, and Arm will be able to give our accelerated computing a reach like never before,” Huang said. “Nvidia has deep artificial intelligence capability, we know how to write the software of artificial intelligence,” he added. “No computing platform has the reach of Arm […], and so the combination [of the two companies] I think is just incredibly powerful that way.” Segars confirmed that Nvidia is going to bring mostly its AI software to the table: “Computers are useless without the software that runs on them,” he said, “ and we are [moving to] a world of AI where software is writing software, software is checking software, software is learning from data […]. I think between us putting the strengths of the companies together, we’re going to be able to address that.”
