Arm: Most products are not subject to US export controls

Arm CEO Simon Segars said that most of our products are not subject to US export controls, and this will not change with the change of US parent company.

Nvidia released a statement today, officially announcing that it will acquire Arm from SoftBank for $40 billion. According to the agreement, Nvidia will pay SoftBank $21.5 billion worth of Nvidia stock and $12 billion in cash, including $2 billion paid immediately upon signing. Nvidia also confirmed that the deal does not include Arm's IoT services.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Simon Segars said in an interview with the media that Nvidia will retain Arm's UK headquarters, which exempts it from many US export control laws and an open licensing model.

Huang stressed that in terms of technology jurisdiction, nothing will change in this transaction. Arm technology originated in the UK and it will remain in the UK as Arm will remain headquartered in the UK and will continue to conduct research and development in the UK.

Simon Segars said that Apple, Qualcomm and others are among Arm's largest customers. Independence is definitely one of Arm's strengths, and it is definitely one of the values ​​of the combination of technology and business models that Arm has created. More than 180 billion chips based on Arm's technology architecture have been shipped. Now, by combining with Nvidia's technology, the company will be able to make greater investments in its technology roadmap. After the merger and acquisition, Arm may be a subsidiary of the parent company, but the purpose is to continue to maintain a certain degree of independence. This means that Arm can still serve the global semiconductor industry through a licensing model, and there will be no changes.

Huang added that the advantage of maintaining independence will ultimately lead to openness and fairness. Maintaining this business model is the best way for Nvidia to continue to expand the scope and success of the efforts that have made it successful in the past, so why not? "The vision that Simon and I share about future technology is that while the future of computing will remain very important for mobile devices, the types of computing architectures that users need (whether in the cloud or not), high-performance computing edge data centers, autonomous devices, robots, IoT terminals, and so on, these types of computing platforms will begin to change shape and size." He pointed out, "Although the architectures will be very similar, they will come in different shapes and sizes, and we are introducing artificial intelligence technology into these architectures, and we must make a lot of investments to do this."