A major chip acquisition by Nvidia will probably never get global regulatory approval. I guess the question is what does Mediatek provide in the partnership. Nvidia is well versed in developing ARM SoCs already.
Market access, shares and relationship to all vendors, most of them never worked with Nvidia. Ready made 5G solutions. Know how in product category that is not as simple as buying IP and making a chip. Shipping Nvidia CUDA GPU IP to all other domains. For acquisition benefits they share the development cost of leading node and volume. Which is part of the wider SemiConductor industry strategy aka Broadcom.
But yes. I guess China would be the first one against it. I never quite understand why Two Company in country A and B would need Country C 's approval for them to merge or be acquired.
Country C's regulators can sanction the companies entities in C including denying access to the market in C. (C.f. how the US got Swiss banks to comply with financial transparency laws.)
It would not matter if C == Lichtenstein, but China is currently the world's biggest semi-conductor market ...
yeah, those are just modules that anybody can just buy. NVIDIA already makes jetsons which are basically SBCs with decent GPU. so again, what does Mediatek provide?
What do you mean by modules, exactly? In a smartphone, which is the largest market, and where Mediatek is pretty strong, many of those functions are integrated as part of a system on chip. Power consumption also required good interplay between the various subsystems. So it's relatively tightly integrated. You also must have good Android drivers/BSP. And phone vendors are not that interested in changing vendors alle the time. There are also a bunch of patents that one must license, which Mediatek likely already does. Often cross licensing with what is typically competitors (like Qualcomm, maybe even Apple), which takes a bunch of time to set up.
looking back at the news releases: Mediatek seems to bring CPU design expertise on the table, which makes sense, they have much more experience and know-how in this than Nvidia. Mediatek is a top tier company with excellent engineering talent. Ideally Nvidia would acquire such a company so that they can challenge AMD and Qualcomm better but this doesn't seem to fit for their strategy to keep it small and focused. Hemce such a partnership works better for them.
Market access, shares and relationship to all vendors, most of them never worked with Nvidia. Ready made 5G solutions. Know how in product category that is not as simple as buying IP and making a chip. Shipping Nvidia CUDA GPU IP to all other domains. For acquisition benefits they share the development cost of leading node and volume. Which is part of the wider SemiConductor industry strategy aka Broadcom.
But yes. I guess China would be the first one against it. I never quite understand why Two Company in country A and B would need Country C 's approval for them to merge or be acquired.