It’s official. NVIDIA has sold the last of its shares in Arm Holdings, 1.1 million shares worth about $140 million based on Arm’s closing price, and with that, it brings an end to one of the most talked-about sagas in semiconductor history.
The disposal occurred sometime in the fourth quarter of last year, and was only revealed through a recent regulatory filing, bringing NVIDIA’s stake to zero.
Yeah, it happened quietly. No big announcement, no press conference. Just a filing that said: we’re out.
From a $40 billion dream to a $140 million exit
To understand why this matters, you have to go back to 2020. NVIDIA agreed to buy Arm for $40 billion, a deal that was expected to become the largest-ever for the chip industry.
The plan made sense on paper, Arm’s architecture is literally inside almost every advanced chip on the planet, from your iPhone to data center servers. Having that under NVIDIA’s roof would have been a massive power move.
But the industry wasn’t having it. Tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and Qualcomm became very nervous about NVIDIA buying Arm, as the company has long held an open licensing model, serving the wider industry.
Regulators from the U.S., UK, and Europe all pushed back hard, and by February 2022, the deal was dead. NVIDIA also had to pay $1.25 billion in compensation to Arm for the failed purchase agreement.
So yes, NVIDIA walked away from that deal having lost over a billion dollars and with nothing to show for it. Ouch.
They lost the ownership, but not the access
Here’s the twist though: despite losing out on the overall Arm deal, NVIDIA will continue to work with the company for its Rubin systems, DGX Spark CPUs, and the heavily rumored N1X chip.
The Grace and Vera processor lines, both critical to NVIDIA’s AI hardware push, still rely on Arm’s architecture. Arm supplies crucial intellectual property that NVIDIA licenses to build chips, so NVIDIA can keep benefiting from Arm designs without owning Arm equity.
That’s actually a pretty clean outcome when you think about it. NVIDIA gets all the technology benefits of the relationship without the regulatory headaches that come with ownership. Analysts largely see the move as a clean, disciplined reset, more about capital allocation and market optics than any cooling toward Arm’s technology.
Meanwhile, NVIDIA is clearly busy deploying its cash elsewhere. It now owns stakes in Intel, Nokia, CoreWeave, and Synopsys, and has vowed to use its cash to help speed the adoption of artificial intelligence computing. The Arm chapter is closed, but NVIDIA’s investment spree is very much still going.
In the end, this feels less like a defeat and more like NVIDIA tidying up loose ends, moving forward with laser focus on the AI era it’s already dominating.
What do you think, was selling the Arm stake the right call for NVIDIA, or did Jensen Huang leave money on the table? Drop your take in the comments, we want to hear it!