According to a few foreign media reports, NVIDIA’s CEO Huang Renxun has agreed to sign a legally binding protection agreement that will compel him to leave the headquarters of the company ARM in the United Kingdom, while retaining ARM’s presence in the UK Job position.
The clause that Renxun agreed to, states that as long as the ARM employees are willing to work in the UK, the company’s headquarters will stay in the country. NVIDIA’s CEO has further added that in the UK headquarters, the company will increase the number of employees at ARM, Cambridge.
However, he has also cleared that the increase of employees would not guarantee to increase the number of jobs. This decision comes after SoftBank Group and Nvidia reached an agreement where the two parties had decided that SoftBank will sell ARM to Nvidia for the whopping price of $40 billion.
According to the mutual agreement, the acquisition will be implemented in the form of stocks and cash. Nvidia will issue $21.5 billion worth of shares to SoftBank and pay $12 billion in cash which will also include an advance payment of $2 billion.
The legal agreement to leave the headquarters where it currently is, arose after the members of Congress, the labour union, and ARM’s co-founder Hermann Hauser expressed their concerns regarding this matter.
They had feared that after the completion of the acquisition the headquarter might be moved to the U.S. This could have led to ARM’s business model, and to prevent it, Hauser pushed the British government to force the chipmaker to make a legally binding commitment to retain ARM’s jobs in the UK.
SoftBank had acquired ARM at the price of $32 billion back in 2016. ARM licenses its technology to many famous software and OEM manufacturers, and more than 95% of smartphones and tablets make use of ARM architecture.
