As Alphabet-owned Waymo expands testing of its autonomous vehicles in San Francisco, automotive vision startup Recogni raises $48.9 million in a Series B financing round. The autonomous vehicle landscape seems to be evolving quickly – and it will be interesting to see if this will have an impact on Mobileye, under the new Intel CEO. Let’s now move to some weekly news updates.
Qualcomm, Google and Microsoft reportedly against Nvidia-Arm deal
According to a report from CNBC, Qualcomm has told regulators around the world that it is against Nvidia’s acquisition of Arm. Qualcomm reportedly complained to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the European Commission, the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority and China’s State Administration for Market Regulation. The FTC’s investigation has reportedly moved to a “second phase” and the U.S. regulator has asked SoftBank (current Arm owner), Nvidia and Arm to provide it with more information. According to a report from Bloomberg, the list of companies complaining to U.S. antitrust regulators about Nvidia’s acquisition of Arm also includes Google and Microsoft. Both CNBC and Bloomberg reports are based on sources who asked not to be identified. Commenting these reports on EETimes, analyst Mike Feibus noted that “not a single Big Tech exec has spoken out publicly against [the Nvidia-Arm deal]”. Feibus also pointed out that the execs he has spoken with over the past few months “say the outcome they fear most is that they might set themselves up for retribution by Nvidia if they object to the acquisition, and the deal is consummated anyway.”
New Arm records
Meanwhile, the value and importance of Arm is reflected in its recently announced results: in the third quarter of 2020 alone, Arm silicon partners shipped 6.7 billion Arm-based chips. Most of them – 4.4 billion – are based on Cortex-M; another key contributor was the Mali graphics processor, which – according to Arm – remains the number one shipping GPU. In calendar year 2020, Arm signed 175 new licenses, bringing the total to 1,910 licenses and 530 licensees.
