NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang sent the following letter to NVIDIA employees today:
Hi everyone,
Today, we announced that we have signed a definitive agreement to purchase Arm.
Thirty years ago, a visionary team of computer scientists in Cambridge, U.K., invented a new CPU architecture optimized for energy-efficiency and a licensing business model that enables broad adoption. Engineers designed Arm CPUs into everything from smartphones and PCs to cloud data centers and supercomputers. An astounding 180 billion computers have been built with Arm — 22 billion last year alone. Arm has become the most popular CPU in the world.
Simon Segars, its CEO, and the people of Arm have built a great company that has shaped the computer industry and nearly every technology market in the world.
We are joining arms with Arm to create the leading computing company for the age of AI. AI is the most powerful technology force of our time. Learning from data, AI supercomputers can write software no human can. Amazingly, AI software can perceive its environment, infer the best plan, and act intelligently. This new form of software will expand computing to every corner of the globe. Someday, trillions of computers running AI will create a new internet — the internet-of-things — thousands of times bigger than today’s internet-of-people.
Uniting NVIDIA’s AI computing with the vast reach of Arm’s CPU, we will engage the giant AI opportunity ahead and advance computing from the cloud, smartphones, PCs, self-driving cars, robotics, 5G, and IoT.
NVIDIA will bring our world-leading AI technology to Arm’s ecosystem while expanding NVIDIA’s developer reach from 2 million to more than 15 million software programmers.
Our R&D scale will turbocharge Arm’s roadmap pace and accelerates data center, edge AI, and IoT opportunities.
Arm’s business model is brilliant. We will maintain its open-licensing model and customer neutrality, serving customers in any industry, across the world, and further expand Arm’s IP licensing portfolio with NVIDIA’s world-leading GPU and AI technology.
Arm’s headquarter will remain in Cambridge and continue to be a cornerstone of the U.K. technology ecosystem. NVIDIA will retain the name and strong brand identity of Arm. Simon and his management team are excited to be joining NVIDIA.
Arm gives us the critical mass to invest in the U.K. We will build a world-class AI research center in Cambridge — the university town of Isaac Newton and Alan Turing, for whom NVIDIA’s Turing GPUs and Isaac robotics platform were named. This NVIDIA research center will be the home of a state-of-the-art AI supercomputer powered by Arm CPUs. The computing infrastructure will be a major attraction for scientists from around the world doing groundbreaking research in healthcare, life sciences, robotics, self-driving cars, and other fields. This center will serve as our European hub to collaborate with universities, industrial partners, and startups. It will also be the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute for Europe, where we teach the methods of applying this marvelous AI technology.
The foundation built by Arm and NVIDIA employees has provided this fantastic opportunity to create the leading computing company for the age of AI. The possibilities of our combined companies are beyond exciting.
I can’t wait.
Jensen