Even if the EU did not have jurisdiction British authorities are not very keen on large mergers either.

British resistance caused American Pfizer to walk away from a potential merger with British AstraZeneca.

I'm not sure how much sway British authorities would have, since ARM is now wholly owned by SoftBank?

In a merger of this scale all the big powers (US, EU, China, and I assume also UK now) have basically veto right.

There are countless examples where country 1 has stopped a merger between a company from country 2 and one from country 3.

> In a merger of this scale all the big powers (US, EU, China, and I assume also UK now) have basically veto right.

> There are countless examples where country 1 has stopped a merger between a company from country 2 and one from country 3.

From what I've seen, the only method of enforcement for a third-party country is to ban the sale of goods in their respective markets following the merger (like GE/Honeywell in the early 2000s). Would that even be possible in this case?

Not sure how this is enforced. Generally the merger falls apart if there are any indications of this happening.

Don't forget that these are public companies and a stopped merger can affect their stock. Besides, major investors would eat the board alive if they put the company in such situation.

Antitrust regulators power is determined by the size of the market, not the location of the company HQ.

Antitrust regulators for big markets like the US, EU can effectively block mergers from any internationally operating company. Both AMD and Nvidia need access to EU - their customers certainly do.

> Antitrust regulators power is determined by the size of the market, not the location of the company HQ.

> Antitrust regulators for big markets like the US, EU can effectively block mergers from any internationally operating company. Both AMD and Nvidia need access to EU - their customers certainly do.

They could block the merger and if the companies decided to go ahead with it anyway, the EU would ban imports. But, wouldn't that further consolidate the market?

> and if the companies decided to go ahead with it anyway

This has never happened, because the profit loss from both parties from losing access to a market with 400M+ people has always made investors blanche.

What I mean is, in what practical way could the EU ban ARM/Nvidia from their market, considering these manufacturers' chips are in many devices? Would that mean devices with those components would also be banned?

What I'm trying to get at is, with a sufficiently large merger, the emerging company may produce products so ubiquitous that it would be impractical to bar them from your economy, due to the widespread use of their products and their integration into other products.

I believe as long as ARM sells their hardware in the EU, they are able to look into antitrust issues.

Not that I disagree with you, but ARM doesn’t sell hardware—they sell licenses to designs of the aforesaid. Nonetheless, don’t forget that nVidia, insofar as it sells hardware in the EU, would definitely be within the scope of local anti-trust authorities.

I don’t see this being much liked by those authorities, either. nVidia is clearly interested in doing this deal because it will give them competitive advantages, and it’s pretty clear by their behaviour versus other firms (including Apple!) that they have so much of that already that they don’t have to “play nice”. Giving them further purview to do as they please is basically what anti-trust is designed to prevent, whether you focus on industry relations or the ascendant on consumers.