Nvidia dumps its $140 million stake in Arm but licensing deals remain and its new PC CPU is still go
The last remnants of Nvidia's once-bold plan to take control of CPU specialist Arm have been defenestrated. According to regulatory filings, Nvidia has dumped its remaining stake in Arm amounting to 1.1 million shares with a value of approximately $140 million.
Nvidia hasn't commented on the move, which took place at the end of last year as per filings with regulators that Nvidia is obliged to make regarding such transactions. So, what are we to make of this?
First, it has no impact on Nvidia's ability to produce and sell CPUs based on Arm IP. That's a function of licensing deals with Arm, not equity stakes or ownership of the company.
Indeed, Nvidia announced a brand new Arm-based CPU recently, known as Vera and using an in-house CPU core customed-designed by Nvidia called Olympus. Nvidia's previous Arm-based CPUs have used bought-in CPU designs.
Of course, Vera is aimed at AI servers, not PCs. However, Nvidia also has a CPU designed for PCs in the works, codenamed N1X. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has indicated that N1X is the same or at least closely related to the GB10 "superchip" in the Nvidia DGX Spark AI box.
GB10 uses off-the-shelf Cortex A725 and X925 designed by Arm, reflecting licences Nvidia holds for those designs. But as the Vera chip shows, Nvidia also has a license to design its own CPU cores that leverage Arm's ISA or instruction set. In other words, Nvidia has both types of Arm licenses and its divestment of Arm shares does nothing to change that.
All that said, arguably what's interesting in all this is what it says about Nvidia's view of the future value of Arm the company. Given that Nvidia is now the world's most valuable company and is generating revenues the likes of which have never been seen before, including over $130 billion in 2025, it seems unlikely that it was desperate for the piffling $140 million or thereabouts raised from unloading its Arm shares.
So, maybe Nvidia thinks Arm shares aren't a great investment. But if so, in an admittedly indirect way, that doesn't imply anything hugely positive about Nvidia's plans for its own chips based on Arm IP, does it?
Of course, Nvidia is easily wealthy enough that it could dump Arm shares as a sort of flex. I'm referring to the backstory here where it emerged in 2020 that Nvidia had designs on taking full control of Arm. Typically, a deal of that size takes place in tranches, with Nvidia gradually building up its stake in Arm. Hence the stake in Arm that Nvidia has just sold.
Whatever, that deal was terminated in 2022 following pushback from regulators. So, maybe this recent Arm stock selloff is Nvidia's final indignant flounce. Or maybe it's just some kind of dispassionate bean counting. All we know for sure is that the Arm deal is now completely dead.