In this file photo, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivers a speech about AI and gaming. In this file photo, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivers a speech about AI and gaming. The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday sued to block a $40 billion deal in which the Silicon Valley chip maker Nvidia sought to buy British chip designer Arm. Officials with the FTC say the deal, which would be the largest semiconductor-chip merger in history, would give Nvidia too much power, hurt competition and raise prices for consumers. "Tomorrow's technologies depend on preserving today's competitive, cutting-edge chip markets," said Holly Vedova, who leads the FTC's competition bureau.

Nvidia's $40 billion acquisition of Arm is a hugely significant deal for the tech world, with implications that will take years to unravel spanning many areas of the sector. But if you listened to the press babble coming from the two companies over the last 24 hours, you'd think there was only one factor driving the purchase: artificial intelligence. "AI is the most powerful technology force of our time. It's the automation of automation, where software writes software," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told journalists during a press call this morning. "Together, [Nvidia and Arm are] going to create the world's premier computing company for the age of AI." On the same call moments later, Arm CEO Simon Segars repeated these sentiments.

NVIDIA has announced a partnership with Internet of Things (IoT) chip designer ARM, aimed at advancing the acceleration of inferencing by making it simple for IoT chip companies to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into their designs. During his keynote at NVIDIA GTC in San Jose on Tuesday, company CEO and founder Jensen Huang explained that the partnership will see the open source NVIDIA Deep Learning Accelerator (NVDLA) architecture integrated into Arm's Project Trillium for machine learning. NVDLA is based on NVIDIA Xavier, touted by the GPU giant as being a "powerful autonomous machine system on a chip." According to Huang, this will provide a free, open architecture to promote a standard way to design deep learning inference. "Inferencing will become a core capability of every IoT device in the future," NVIDIA vice president and general manager of Autonomous Machines, Deepu Talla, said during a press briefing.