Nvidia-Arm deal: the CEOs’ perspective

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.”

Carrying on the commitment started with CUDA support to Arm

While committing to an ecosystem does not require to buy its founding company, there is no doubt that the acquisition of Arm will allow Nvidia to coherently proceed to the next step in the commitment strategy announced last July 2019. Back then Nvidia announced its support for Arm CPUs, making available to the Arm ecosystem its full stack of AI and HPC software: all Nvidia CUDA-X AI and HPC libraries, GPU-accelerated AI frameworks and software development tools such as PGI compilers with OpenACC support and profilers. Nvidia made that decision after recognizing the current role of Arm: “It took us several years to come to the conclusion that Arm is finally at a point where it’s going to evolve way past mobile devices,” Huang said. “It’s going to go into high performance computing, into the cloud, into the edge, into autonomous machines.” According to Huang, the Arm ecosystem response to CUDA “has been fantastic.” The acquisition of Arm is consistent with last year’s Nvidia initiative: “I’ve always wished that we could take the Nvidia architecture and put it through the Arm’s network,” Huang explained, “so that companies of all different sizes and shapes, and different industries could take advantage of our IP and allow us to extend the accelerated computing vision we have to all the industries.”

Waiting for regulators to approve the acquisition, Nvidia has announced additional support to the Arm ecosystem on occasion of its GTC event (GPU Technology Conference). As explained in a blog post, Nvidia is bringing the Arm ecosystem an expanding set of tools, including: Nvidia AI, the industry standard for accelerating AI training and inference; Nvidia Rapids, a suite of software libraries to run data science and analytics on GPUs; Nvidia HPC SDK, consisting in compilers, libraries and software tools for high performance computing; and Nvidia RTX, graphics drivers that deliver ray tracing and AI capabilities. Nvidia also announced that it is working with three members of the Arm ecosystem: Fujitsu, Marvell, and Ampere. “You have processors, you have systems, you have libraries and you have the ecosystem, and we’ll support it for as long as we shall live,” Huang said at the Arm DevSummit.

Arm to keep its business model and GPU/NPU offering

Concerns have obviously been raised about the future of Arm’s business model. At the Arm DevSummit, Huang pledged that it will remain unchanged. “I love Arm’s business model!” he said. “We have every intention of protecting it, nurturing it and growing [it].” Questions may also arise about the future of Arm’s GPUs/NPUs [the Mali and Ethos product families], potentially competing against some Nvidia products. But Huang dismissed that concern, too: “We’re going to keep doing it,” he said. “We want to give customers as many choices as possible. Every customer is not trying to build the same type of system, and some of the customers would probably want to design their own. And so we want to give the customers in the market as many opportunities to innovate and differentiate as possible. So we’re going to continue to advance [Arm’s GPU/NPU product families].”

Confidence in deal approval

The Nvidia-Arm deal is obviously subject to regulators’ scrutiny, but Huang is not worried about that. “I am confident,” he said. “We are confident that [the deal] is going to go through. […]  As soon as we explain the rationale of the transaction and our plans to regulators around the world, they will realize that these are two complementary companies.”

Segars agreed: “This is a deal that is about expanding. It’s about creating more and new technology. It’s about putting that technology in the hands of people who are going to build really cool stuff with it. So from that point of view, this is about enabling more people to do more things. That’s the positive thing that as regulators do scrutinize this, they’re going to be able to see. Now, I’m sure it’s going to take a while […], but I think we’re going to get to the end of that, […] and that we’ll get approval.”

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