Nvidia is apparently about to buy chip manufacturer Arm Holdings

(Image credit: Nvidia)

The Financial Times reports that Nvidia is about to buy Arm Holdings, the UK-based chip manufacturer, from its current owner SoftBank for $40 billion. The SoftBank Group, a Japanese holding company, only recently bought Arm themselves, paying $32 billion in in 2016. Nvidia will apparently cover part of the transaction with their own shares.

While Nvidia, who the Financial Times points out "recently overtook Intel to become the world's most valuable chipmaker", tends to focus on high-end chips of the kind favored by PC gamers, Arm currently have market dominance in the fields of mobile, tablet, and smart TV chips.

Nvidia recently acquired data storage and management platform Swiftstack, and Mellanox Technologies, a supplier of InfiniBand and Ethernet networking products.

According to the Financial Times, the deal will may be announced on Monday.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.