Pavel Jelic We are in the first day of the 38th week of 2020. Believe it or not, in a few days we will be in autumn, and after that it will be Christmas. But let's not get ahead of ourselves unnecessarily and let's take a look at the summary of news from the IT world together in this article. Specifically, today we'll look at the big deal that nVidia and SoftBank made, and then we'll talk more about the TikTok situation.
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Vratislav Holub Arm Holdings acquisition by nVidia is imminent
It's been a few weeks since we featured you in our magazine informed about the fact that the multinational Japanese company SoftBank is going to sell its company Arm Holdings, which it owned for about four years. After the 2016 buyout, SoftBank had really big plans for Arm Holdings—and not yet. A huge boom in the Arm architecture was expected and huge orders were expected, but unfortunately it did not happen. For those four years, Arm Holdings did not show any real profit, but on the other hand, it made a dizzying loss. It is therefore logical that there is no reason to keep and worry about such a company. And this is exactly the reason why SoftBank decided to sell off Arm Holdings. At first it looked like Apple might be interested in Arm Holdings. There were even rumors that the Apple company was supposed to agree on a buyout, but in the end it came to nothing, as there was a threat of a conflict of interests - other companies dependent on Arm Holdings were afraid that Apple would somehow cut them off or negatively affect them after the buyout.
It is Arm Holdings that holds the licenses for A-series processors from Apple, which beat in iPhones, iPads, Apple TV and other Apple devices. In addition, Apple recently announced the arrival of Apple Silicon's own ARM processors, so the acquisition of Arm Holdings would certainly come in handy. However, as I mentioned above, the acquisition failed and nVidia joined the "game". She appeared out of the blue and showed quite a lot of interest in the acquisition of Arm Holdings. This interest was visible to the public a few weeks ago, but after that there was silence on the footpath about the whole situation. However, it turns out that in that silence there has been intense negotiating of terms between nVidia and SoftBank, as today we learned that the two sides have agreed and nVidia is set to acquire Arm Holdings for $40 billion. However, the fact that both parties have agreed does not mean anything at all. Everything still has to go through various authorities that will check possible conflicts of interest and other aspects. If all goes according to plan, nVidia will own 90% of Arm Holdings, with SoftBank then keeping the remaining 10%.
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Oracle as a possible buyer of the American part of TikTok, or a lie?
A similar situation that we described in the paragraphs above also applies to TikTok. As you probably know, the US government decided a few weeks ago that it plans to ban the popular social network TikTok in the United States. This idea was helped by the Indian government's decision to outright ban TikTok in India due to alleged spying and collection of sensitive user data. But in the end, the USA decided to get the most out of the whole situation, and thus a kind of business plan was created. The first option is that there will be a complete ban on TikTok in the US, the second option after that is that the American part of TikTok is sold to an American company, which will then do a complete "revitalization" and guarantee that it will not collect any sensitive data and stop the alleged spying. Microsoft was initially most interested in TikTok, and Donald Trump, the current US president, gave the two companies several months to potentially work out a deal. At the moment, however, there is more or less silence regarding the whole situation, but as expected - Microsoft stated that until the agreement is concluded, it will not inform the public in any way.
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In addition to Microsoft, however, Oracle was also later interested in the American part of TikTok, and the tables turned in this case. Despite the fact that Microsoft was supposed to win this agreement, in recent days, on the contrary, information about the opposite has started to leak. According to available reports, the agreement with ByteDance, the company behind TikTok, was to be won by Oracle, which became interested in the whole situation much later. Does it seem confusing already? Don't worry, it's actually a lot more complicated than that. Chinese media claim that ByteDance has decided not to sell the American part of TikTok. This was eventually reported by Microsoft, which confirmed this information in its blog post. ByteDance has six more days to complete the deal, until September 20, and then has until November 12 to complete the entire deal. If ByteDance does not reach an agreement with an American company, TikTok will be banned in the US on September 29. For now, it is not at all clear whether Oracle will become the owner of the American part of TikTok, or whether TikTok will be banned in America. But we will definitely inform you about it in the next summaries.
It's somehow not clear to me why if Apple wanted or maybe didn't want to buy ARM, it would be a conflict of interest and other companies were afraid of it, and if nVIDIA, which also makes ARM processors, wants to do the same, then it's simply not a conflict of interest?