Qualcomm could be next to try their hand at acquiring ARM

Some of you might recall that a while back, NVIDIA announced their intentions to acquire ARM. Unfortunately, following a lot of resistance, NVIDIA ultimately backed out of the deal. Now it looks like Qualcomm could be planning to acquire the company themselves.

This is according to Qualcomm’s CEO Cristiano Amon, who spoke to the Financial Times and revealed that they were looking into potentially forming some sort of consortium to acquire ARM. This means that it wouldn’t just be Qualcomm that would own ARM, but the group of companies that are part of the consortium.

That being said, it should be noted that NVIDIA’s failed attempt to acquire ARM has resulted in SoftBank rethinking their strategy. Instead of putting ARM up for sale, SoftBank is now preparing to take ARM public so that they could potentially sell off their stake to get back the money from their initial investment.

It doesn’t mean that SoftBank would be opposed to an acquisition if there is a good deal to be had, but presumably it would require a bit of convincing. What’s also interesting is that Intel had also previously expressed a similar idea of forming a consortium, and just recently, Intel had a meeting with Samsung over in South Korea. We’re not sure if a discussion about forming a consortium took place during that meeting, but it’s interesting.

Whether or not this consortium will be formed and whether or not SoftBank will be willing to go through another round of regulatory hurdles remains to be seen.

Source: SamMobile