Nvidia has sold off the last of its shares in Arm Holdings, some six years after it attempted to buy the company outright for $40 billion, but was stopped by EU and UK regulators, as Bloomberg reports. This amounts to 1.1 million shares worth an estimated $140 million. Though this draws to a close Nvidia's ownership ambitions, it won't end the partnership, with Nvidia and ARM still set to work together on its Arm-based CPUs, including in its Vera Rubin platform.
The actual share disposal took place sometime in the last few months of 2025, with only the filing now revealing the divestment of Nvidia's ARM holdings. It feels a little anticlimactic after talk of such enormous deals not so long ago. But in 2026, that deal has in turn been dwarfed by the scale of investments among the major tech firms, often reaching into the hundreds of billions.
Even Nvidia's recent chip deal du jour, its non-exclusive licensing agreement with AI inferencing hardware firm Groq, worth $20 billion, feels somewhat pedestrian now.
The deal that never was
In September 2020, while the world was grappling with the global pandemic, Nvidia was making moves to purchase British software and semiconductor design firm, Arm Holdings. Its majority shareholder, Softbank - the same Japanese investment firm that has invested so heavily in OpenAI and many other AI players approved the deal, and the agreed figure was set at $40 billion. If it had been finalized, it would have been one of the largest semiconductor company acquisitions ever, falling just behind Dell's $64 billion purchase of EMC in 2016.
Nvidia pledged to maintain Arm's licensing model and would continue to work with major partners like Samsung, Qualcomm, and Apple, among others. But those same companies weren't so keen, and many raised concerns to regulators over anti-competitiveness.
Authorities in the UK and EU, which had already been scrutinizing such a large-scale deal, dived into the details and announced investigations in early 2021. They raised concerns that a deal of this magnitude between two key players in the technology hardware space could result in worse products for consumers, alongside higher prices. With Arm's hardware present in a range of components from different companies, it was felt that with ownership, Nvidia would have too much power over its competitors.
The back and forth went on for several more months before the deal ultimately started to fall apart in early 2022. Despite Nvidia's efforts, regulators finally put a halt to it, forcing Nvidia to pay a $1.25 billion exit fee.
Softbank ultimately took ARM into an initial public offering the next year, valuing the company at just under $55 billion. As of February 2026, ARM has a market cap of $133 billion.
Onwards and upwards
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