ARM pledges to erect 'firewalls' against Nvidia meddling

As Nvidia continues to make the case for its proposed $40 billion purchase of chip technology vendor ARM, an executive from ARM today told Reuters that ARM will institute measures to protect customer relationships from being violated by Nvidia.

"We are going to keep the firewalls up between the two companies relative to confidentiality, and we're not going to give any early access to Nvidia," Rene Haas, ARM's president of its IP Products Group, told Reuters's Stephen Nellis in an interview. 

Interestingly, Haas explicitly mentioned a potential competitor to ARM, the open-source RISC V movement. 

Writes Nellis, "But Haas said some information would still need to be conveyed to Nvidia, such as if major customers disclosed plans to move to RISC-V, an open source competitor to Arm, setting the stage for a downturn in sales that might in turn affect Nvidia's financial results."