Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Nvidia has been trying to buy Arm for $40 billion for over a year now — but this week, the acquisition was hit with its biggest roadblock yet. On Monday, the Federal Trade Commission laid out the case to stop the merger from going through, arguing that the deal would “stifle competing next-generation technologies.”
It’s the most significant attempt to reign in Big Tech yet under Lina Khan’s term as FTC chair, so there’s a lot at stake, both for the FTC and the electronics industry at large. Arm is a hugely important company; the company’s chip designs touch hundreds of billions of devices, including CPUs and ISPs for modern cars, embedded chipsets for wearable and medical devices, smart home gadgets like thermostats and routers, and of…
