Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, told CNBC on Thursday that he was confident in the company’s growth story, even though its potential acquisition of British chip designer Arm does not happen.
“Nvidia will be huge, no matter what,” Huang said in “Mad Money”, in response to a question from Jim Cramer, the show’s host. Cramer asked the executive how investors should think about Nvidia in the long term, while his $ 40 billion deal to buy Arm owned by Softbank remained pending.
Numerous companies in the technology landscape, including chip maker Qualcomm and Microsoft based in California, told the Federal Trade Commission that they were concerned that the Nvidia-Arm deal could hurt competition. The FTC, the US antitrust regulator, opened an “in-depth investigation” of the acquisition, Bloomberg reported earlier this month.
Nvidia, which is known for its graphics chips for games, first announced the deal in September. Shortly after it was released, Cramer told viewers of “Mad Money” that if “Nvidia can close at Arm Holdings, the action will be unstoppable, even after its magnificent run of several years.”
Nvidia’s shares have risen 103% in the past 12 months, compared to a 22.4% gain for the S&P 500. In the past five years, the chipmaker’s shares have risen by almost 1,600%.
Huang said on Thursday that Nvidia’s chips remain the core of numerous disruptive technologies, keeping secular tail winds intact. A day earlier, the company reported quarterly sales of $ 5 billion, representing 61% year-on-year growth. Both revenue and earnings exceeded Wall Street expectations.
“The growth opportunity that lies ahead for artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, manufacturing, industrial robotics, 5G edge, these applications will make us a very big company,” said Huang, who founded California-based Nvidia in 1993. ” I think our growth trajectory is very exciting … We hope it will be a year of great growth for the data center, and all of this is independent of Arm, “added Huang.
At the same time, Huang also sought to defend Nvidia’s desire to buy Arm, which is known for designing the chip architecture used in most of the world’s mobile phones.
“We will be able to inject so much exciting and engineering scale into Arm to speed up its roadmap, that the ecosystem will love it,” he said, adding, “We are going to close this deal. I am very confident about that.”
Last year, Nvidia completed a $ 7 billion acquisition of chip maker Mellanox Technologies. It took more than 13 months to complete while Chinese regulators examined the deal.
Nvidia’s stock closed down more than 8% on Thursday, which proved to be a difficult session for many tech companies as investors digested the increase in bond yields.
Disclosure: Cramer’s charity fund has Nvidia shares.