Chip designer Arm will cut between 12-15% of its workforce due to the collapse of NVIDIA’s $40 billion (£29 billion) takeover.
The majority of the losses will be in the UK and US – with up to 1,000 jobs being affected.
Arm explains: “Like any business, Arm is continually reviewing its business plan to ensure the company has the right balance between opportunities and cost discipline. Unfortunately, this process includes proposed redundancies across Arm’s global workforce.”
The news follows on from last month, when NVIDIA’s purchase of Arm from Japan’s SoftBank was terminated due to regulatory pressure.
The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) found that NVIDIA’s purchase of the chip developer & designer raised “serious competition concerns”.
The US Federal Trade Commission had also started legal action to block the deal.
According to The Times, Arm employees would have shared a $1.5 billion (£1.1 billion) acquisition payout and retention bonus had the takeover gone through.
However, as Sky News notes, Arm co-founder Hermann Hauser, who is no longer with the company, claimed the deal would have resulted in thousands of UK job losses through the shift of headquarters to the US.
As mentioned last month, the UK government had previously said it wanted to examine the sale of Arm to the US firm on national security grounds. Digital Secretary Oliver Dowden issued an intervention notice, and following that, the CMA determined an in-depth investigation into the deal between NVIDIA and Arm was warranted.
NVIDIA painted a positive picture of those events and looked ahead to a better future.
Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO of NVIDIA, explained at the time: “Arm is at the centre of the important dynamics in computing. Though we won’t be one company, we will partner closely with Arm. The significant investments that Masa [Masayoshi Son, CEO of SoftBank] 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.”
SoftBank said it will start preparations for a public offering of Arm within the fiscal year ending 31 March 2023.
SoftBank bought Arm for $32 billion (£23.3 billion) in 2016, and the planned sale to NVIDIA was perceived as an opportunity to raise cash due to the losses SoftBank suffered from investments in WeWork and Uber.
