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Comment by rafaelturk | Hacker News Reader

IMO this is lovely, but innocuous, such plead should be made a long time ago when ARMs was sold to SoftBank

That happened in the midst of Brexit and it feels like it was over before it began for the public.

It’s relatively dismissive of the past to imply that it was not a lamented loss at the time, but it was a loss we learned of after the fact- not before it.

This is the earliest indication I can find:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12112850

That was the same day the acquisition completed.

I do agree with you, but he did make similar arguments when it was sold to SoftBank.[0]

I think the difference here is that now he thinks that a sale to Nvidia threatens Arm's business model, as now Nvidia will be deciding whether it wants to sell it's licences to it's direct competitors.

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-36827769

Softbank doesn't have to comply with US tech restrictions and isn't also a customer who could be given special treatment once the deal went through. Also since they're just a holding company they were less likely to move jobs out of the UK. I don't think the two situations are at all the same.

Softbank has billions invested in the US so yes it does.

For those US companies it does, but I don't think that would apply here since it would be a japanese company investing in a UK company, of course, I could be wrong. Either way the point is "most of the reasons given in this article didn't apply to Softbank which is why it doesn't make sense that they should have argued this when the Softbank investment happened"

US Sanctions are universal they apply to any entity that has dealings with the US, if it violates the sanctions it can be sanctioned itself if it has billions worth of US assets on their books they are especially exposed not that a country like SoftBank would give up the US market to invested in a Pyongyang startup anyhow.

As far as ARM specifically well they have already revoked the licenses for Huawei and a few others and now there is the situation where ARM China is essentially a rogue entity being seized by the CCP.

Fair enough; in that case this reason would apply, except ARM presumably would also already have had to follow these restrictions and the other reasons given in the article wouldn't apply to softbank, so I still don't think it makes sense to say "they should have raised this earlier when softbank bought a chunk of them"

Precisely. The moment that happened, the basis of ARMs business model was to generate returns for SoftBank. Nothing else.

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