3 Minutes to Read Reuters, July 2 – The proposed $40 billion acquisition of Arm Ltd by Nvidia Corp would better assist the creation of UK technology employment than the SoftBank Group Corp business becoming a separate public company again, according to Arm’s CEO. “We considered going public,” Arm CEO Simon Segars wrote in a blog post, “but felt that the pressure to generate short-term sales growth and profitability would choke our freedom to invest, develop, move quickly, and innovate.” “Joining forces with Nvidia will provide us with the scale, resources, and agility required to seize the opportunities ahead,” Segars wrote. Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon told The Telegraph and other media sites last week that if the Nvidia agreement goes through, Qualcomm is ready to investing in an initial public offering by Arm. According to Amon, joint ownership of Arm by industry colleagues would keep the company independent. Qualcomm did not respond to a request for comment right away. Last year, Nvidia revealed its intention to buy Cambridge, England-based Arm, a long-time neutral chip design technology supplier, from the Japanese conglomerate, which owns no other semiconductor companies. Allowing Arm to be owned by a single chip company, according to critics such as Qualcomm Inc, might lead to it focusing on technology that benefit its owner rather than the broader industry. The deal is being scrutinized by regulators in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. In 2016, SoftBank paid $32 billion for Arm, betting on a growth in internet-of-things (IoT) chips. Arm spent a lot of money on hiring to pursue the technology. However, the IoT industry did not provide a revenue boom for Arm, and the company later raised pricing for some of its technology in the United States, causing some customers to become enraged. (Stephen Nellis contributed reporting from San Francisco, and Richard Chang edited the piece.)/n
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