Europe is worried about the potential takeover of Britain's Arm by the American Nvidia
The stand of the Nvidia company at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in 2014 (illustrative image).
AP - Manu Fernandez
Text by: Sidonie Gaucher
4 min
It is both a technological and a political war, which is being fought inside our phones and computers.
Companies specializing in the manufacture of microprocessors are in the spotlight, a situation which concerns the links between the United Kingdom and Europe.
And in the future, the place of Europe between Washington and Beijing.
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From our correspondent in London,
When we think of the IT giants, we often think of Google, Samsung or Apple.
But the one that holds 95% of the world market for microprocessors is the company Arm.
Little known to the general public, Arm is a flagship of British industry.
The bluetooth of your smartphone, the wifi of your computer, or even your games console or your tablet work thanks to chips patented by Arm.
Created in 1990, Arm has a particularity: it does not produce anything itself.
It develops chip technology and patent for all microprocessor manufacturers in the world.
And it is this neutrality that allows it to be essential.
Finally, until now, because the American graphics card giant Nvidia is in the process of acquiring the company Arm.
Concern over national security
But the English government is trying to reverse this 40 billion dollar operation.
The reason ?
Concerns for national security in the United Kingdom but eventually, perhaps also for the whole of Europe.
Herman Hauser, the Austrian co-founder of the company, is also sounding the alarm.
According to him, the acquisition of Arm by Nvidia signals the death warrant of this European nugget.
This operation is problematic as much for Europe as for the United Kingdom, because it would mean that the United Kingdom is parting ways with assets of more than 35 billion euros.
If the company had been bought in 2016 by the Japanese SoftBank, the headquarters remained in Cambridge, and employed 6,700 employees.
And even if Nvidia wants to build the UK's fastest supercomputer, the Cambridge-1,
Silicon Valley's
appeal
will be inevitable with the company's Americanization.
Nvidia, the new market leader?
Because by buying Arm, Nvidia would join the American giants of chip cards AMD and Intel.
Intel is the “Intel inside” of the 1990s. It remains the largest manufacturer on the market today, but for how long?
Intel “divorced” Apple last winter, and Nvidia already exceeds its competitor's stock market capital by 50%.
The royal road to rule over as many connected object markets as possible.
With the amount of connected objects around the world, it's a huge slice of the pie for Nvidia.
On this scale, it is an economic as much as a political problem, because
China, with Huawei
, Lenovo or Xiaomi, is a big user of the Arm chips.
And she does not welcome the arrival of this massive weapon in American territory.
Europe is witnessing the technological and political divide between the two Chinese and American giants.
In Brussels as in London, we are worried about this loss of neutrality and the major risk to this ultra-dependence on American technologies: all it takes is a movement of temper from an American president to prevent access to these technologies. and our entire connected life depends on it.
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