United Kingdom: CMA closes inquiry into NVIDIA/Arm merger in consequence of acquisition termination

On 8 February 2022, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced that is closing its investigation into NVIDIA's planned acquisition of Arm Ltd. This followed the announcement by Nvidia on 7 February 2022 regarding the termination of the transaction to acquire Arm, citing regulatory challenges from competition authorities as reason. The CMA had opened its investigation on 6 January 2021 to determine if the merger could negatively impact the competition and innovation in the semiconductor industry. The company Arm licenses the intellectual property (IP) on processing units to developers of semiconductor chipmakers and systems-on-chip. NVIDIA develops graphics processing units and system on chip units for data centres, automotive applications and gaming. Regarding the investigation, CMA noted that the acquisition would have harmed competition because NVIDIA would be able to restrict the access of its competitors to the Arm technology.