Huawei, other Chinese tech firms are said to seek curbs on Nvidia’s US$40 billion Arm acquisition

Chief among their concerns is that Nvidia may force British firm Arm to cut off its Chinese clients

Arm’s semiconductor designs and architecture are central to most of the world’s electronics, from smartphones to supercomputers

Reading Time:3 minutes

British firm Arm’s designs are fundamental to a plethora of products from Huawei Technologies, including its Kirin smartphone processors, Kunpeng server chips and Ascend for artificial intelligence applications. Photo: Bloomberg

Published: 2:54pm, 21 Oct 2020Updated: 3:20pm, 21 Oct 2020

Chinese technology companies including Huawei Technologies have expressed strong concerns to local regulators about Nvidia Corp’s proposed acquisition of chip designer Arm, people familiar with the matter said, potentially jeopardising the US$40 billion deal.

Several of the country’s most influential tech firms have been lobbying the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) to either reject the transaction or impose conditions to ensure their access to Arm technology, the people said.

Chief among their concerns is that Nvidia may force the British firm to cut off Chinese clients, they said, asking not to be identified discussing private deliberations. It is feared that Arm – whose semiconductor designs and architecture are central to most of the world’s electronics, from smartphones to supercomputers – will become yet another pawn in the struggle for tech supremacy between the US and China.

Nvidia is buying Arm from Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp, bringing it under American jurisdiction and theoretically threatening the British company’s cherished status as a neutral party in the semiconductor industry.

Any review of the deal in Beijing is likely to be coloured by what it perceives as growing US attempts to contain China’s largest technology companies. It has the power to approve the deal because China is by far the world’s largest consumer of semiconductors, importing about US$300 billion worth of chips annually.

Select Voice

Choose your listening speed

Get through articles 2x faster

1.25x

250 WPM

Slow

Average

Fast

00:0000:00

1.25x