Why Intel did not buy ARM is something that puzzles me...
In 2016 ARM sold to SoftBank for $31B.
In 2016 Intel had a market cap of ~$170B and about $17B cash on hand. I'm no M&A analyst but surely given their fundamentals at the time Intel could have bought ARM without financial difficulty, no?
If even Facebook can look two steps ahead and pay an eye watering $19B for WhatsApp couldn't someone in the C-level at Intel could have seen that owning ARM would have been a jolly good strategic purchase - or am I missing something?
I can see why buying ARM would be a problem for antitrust laws but I don't see why it would be the case for NVIDIA. It seems that ATI/AMD were a stronger competitor to NVIDIA on the GPU side that they were to Intel on the CPU one.
Intel had (or still has?) the biggest share on the graphics market as every intel cpu had (has?) an integrated gpu. So by definition of market share the largest supplier wanting to buy the second one is an antitrust problem.
It does not matter that intels graphics cores are much worse.
Why should Intel enter the business of selling chips as fast as they can with a margin of 30 cents per chip when they are already in the business of selling chips as fast as they can with a margin of 30 dollars per chip?
At no point does Intel selling ARM make financial sense until Intel is on the verge of death.
In 2016 ARM sold to SoftBank for $31B.
In 2016 Intel had a market cap of ~$170B and about $17B cash on hand. I'm no M&A analyst but surely given their fundamentals at the time Intel could have bought ARM without financial difficulty, no?
If even Facebook can look two steps ahead and pay an eye watering $19B for WhatsApp couldn't someone in the C-level at Intel could have seen that owning ARM would have been a jolly good strategic purchase - or am I missing something?