Soft­Bank to Explo­re Arm Public Offering

SANTA CLARA, Calif., and TOKYO – Feb. 7, 2022 – NVIDIA and Soft­Bank Group Corp. (“SBG” or “Soft­Bank”) today announ­ced the ter­mi­na­ti­on of the pre­vious­ly announ­ced tran­sac­tion wher­eby NVIDIA would acqui­re Arm Limi­t­ed (“Arm”) from SBG. The par­ties agreed to ter­mi­na­te the Agree­ment becau­se of signi­fi­cant regu­la­to­ry chal­lenges pre­ven­ting the con­sum­ma­ti­on of the tran­sac­tion, despi­te good faith efforts by the par­ties. Arm will now start pre­pa­ra­ti­ons for a public offering. 

“Arm has a bright future, and we’ll con­ti­nue to sup­port them as a proud licen­see for deca­des to come,” said Jen­sen Huang, foun­der and chief exe­cu­ti­ve offi­cer of NVIDIA. “Arm is at the cen­ter of the important dyna­mics in com­pu­ting. Though we won’t be one com­pa­ny, we will part­ner clo­se­ly with Arm. The signi­fi­cant invest­ments that Masa has made have posi­tio­ned Arm to expand the reach of the Arm CPU bey­ond cli­ent com­pu­ting to super­com­pu­ting, cloud, AI and robo­tics. I expect Arm to be the most important CPU archi­tec­tu­re of the next decade.”

SBG today also announ­ced that, in coor­di­na­ti­on with Arm, it will start pre­pa­ra­ti­ons for a public offe­ring of Arm within the fis­cal year ending March 31, 2023. SBG belie­ves Arm’s tech­no­lo­gy and intellec­tu­al pro­per­ty will con­ti­nue to be at the cen­ter of mobi­le com­pu­ting and the deve­lo­p­ment of arti­fi­ci­al intelligence.

“Arm is beco­ming a cen­ter of inno­va­ti­on not only in the mobi­le pho­ne revo­lu­ti­on, but also in cloud com­pu­ting, auto­mo­ti­ve, the Inter­net of Things and the meta­ver­se, and has ente­red its second growth pha­se,” said Masay­o­shi Son, Repre­sen­ta­ti­ve Direc­tor, Cor­po­ra­te Offi­cer, Chair­man & Chief Exe­cu­ti­ve Offi­cer of Soft­Bank Group Corp. “We will take this oppor­tu­ni­ty and start pre­pa­ring to take Arm public, and to make even fur­ther progress.”

Mr. Son con­tin­ued, “I want to thank Jen­sen and his talen­ted team at NVIDIA for try­ing to bring tog­e­ther the­se two gre­at com­pa­nies and wish them all the success.”

NVIDIA and SBG had announ­ced that they had ente­red into a defi­ni­ti­ve agree­ment, under which NVIDIA would acqui­re Arm from Soft­Bank, on Sep­tem­ber 13, 2020. In accordance with the terms of the agree­ment, SBG* will retain the $1.25 bil­li­on pre­paid by NVIDIA, which will be recor­ded as pro­fit in the fourth quar­ter, and NVIDIA will retain its 20-year Arm license.

* 24.99% of Arm shares are attri­bu­ta­ble to Soft­Bank Visi­on Fund 1.