The moment the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) got involved, the deal was almost certainly doomed. Nvidia has made it official by backing out of the agreement to buy Arm from SoftBank Group.
Though it will cost $1.25bn to sever the agreement, it is a lot less than the near $70bn and mountains of legal bills the maker of graphics processing units (GPUs) would have to pay to continue to go through with the deal, if it would be allowed at all. Practically every major market in the world was acting on complaints from Nvidia’s competitors. Given that Nvidia’s stewardship might have had customers running, like Intel, into the arms of the open-source instruction set architecture RISC-V, not owning Arm probably is not that big a problem for CEO Jen-Hsun Huang’s company, which itself is a RISC-V user.
There was some advantage to be had in making Nvidia a broad-based supplier of processors that cover every application. But there is little to stop it doing that...