The Federal Trade Commission may have driven the decisive stake through the heart of the plan by Nvidia to bolster its ambitions to become a full-spectrum computer designer. On Thursday, the US antitrust organisation said it would sue to prevent the merger going through, following a series of investigations being opened around the world to scrutinise the deal.
In the summer, Citi analysts saw the UK regulator clearing the deal as three sizeable customers in the shape of Broadcom, Marvell and MediaTek said they were OK with it going ahead. It is worth noting that Nvidia competes head-on with Marvell in the relatively new market of data processing units (DPUs), which are designed to speed up network switches. Geopolitically, the friction between the US and China seemed to tilt things in favour of Nvidia. Chinese companies fear having access to Arm being cut off after the acquisition, which is one thing that might make the US government give the action the...