It appears that the company that designs current and future Apple processors, ARM, is for sale. It seems an incongruity, with the promising future that it promises thanks to the Apple Silicon project. They have a guaranteed job for years with a client like Apple, or Microsoft, among many others.
But if we investigate a little and see that the owner of ARM is a venture capital company like Softbank, the thing changes. It is the way they do business. They buy a company with projection, and wait just enough time for it to finish exploding commercially, to sell it, increasing its price enormously. Apple has already said that it is not interested, and now Nvidia is doing numbers ...
Bloomberg just published a report explaining that recently SoftBank Group Corp., owner of ARM Ltd., had discussions with Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC),, so that it would buy your processor design company.
It is explained in this article that SoftBank recently approached Apple to measure the interest of the iPhone manufacturer in the tender of the firm of chip design Arm Ltd., as leaked by people who were in those conversations.
The two firms had several meetings about it, but Apple is not about to even make an offer. Arm's licensing operation would be a poor fit with Apple's hardware-centric business model. There may also be concerns with competition laws If Apple buys a key licensee that supplies so many competing rivals. The representatives of SoftBank and Apple have neither confirmed nor denied the news.
As the report points out, this would have been a very expensive acquisition even for Apple. SoftBank paid 32.000 million dollars per ARM in 2016, much more than what Apple paid for Beats, for example, which was "only" 3.000 million. The current sale price would be much higher than those 32.000 million.
Apple has not wanted to enter the bid and NVIDIA has submitted an offer
Bloomberg points out that in Cupertino there could be some concern that an Apple rival such as Microsoft could buy ARM. At this point it appears that graphics processor giant NVIDIA is the leader in the bidding, having made an undisclosed bid on what would be the largest ever acquisition in the chip industry. We'll see how this all ends.
