Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC on Thursday that he was confident in the company’s growth history, even if his possible box office acquisition of British chip designer Arm does not occur.
“Nvidia will be huge, come what may,” Huang told Mad Money in response to a question from Jim Cramer, the show’s presenter. Cramer asked the executive how investors should think about Nvidia in the long run, while its $ 40 billion Softbank-owned Arm purchase deal remained pending.
Numerous technology companies, including California-based chip maker Qualcomm and Microsoft, have reported to the Federal Trade Commission that they were concerned that the Nvidia-Arm deal could hurt competition. The FTC, the U.S. antitrust regulator, has opened an “in-depth investigation” into the acquisition, Bloomberg reported earlier this month.
Nvidia, which is known for its gaming graphics chips, first announced the deal in September. Shortly after its publicity, Cramer told viewers of “Mad Money” that if “Nvidia can shut down Arm Holdings, stocks will be unstoppable even after its magnificent multi-year career.”
Shares of Nvidia have advanced 103% in the last twelve months, compared with a gain of 22.4% for the S&P 500. In the last five years, shares of the chip maker have risen close to 1,600%.
Huang said Thursday that Nvidia’s chips remain the core of numerous disruptive technologies, keeping his secular tailwinds in touch. A day earlier, the company recorded quarterly sales of $ 5 billion, representing year-over-year growth of 61%. Both revenue and earnings exceeded Wall Street expectations.
“The growth opportunity we have ahead of artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, manufacturing, industrial robotics, 5G edge, these applications will make us a very large company,” said Huang, who founded Nvidia based in California in 1993. “I think our growth trajectory is very exciting … We hope it’s a great year of growth for the data center, and all of that is independent of Arm,” Huang added.
At the same time, Huang also tried to defend Nvidia’s desire to buy Arm, which is known for designing the chip architecture used in most mobile phones in the world.
“We will be able to inject so much exciting scale and so much engineering into Arm to speed up its roadmap, which will delight the ecosystem,” he said, adding, “We will make this deal. I have a lot of confidence in it.”
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.
Shares of Nvidia closed above 8% on Thursday, which turned out to be a difficult session for many tech companies as investors digested the yields on rising bonds.
Disclosure: Cramer’s charity has shares in Nvidia.