Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, told CNBC on Thursday that he was confident about the company’s growth story even if the potential blockbuster acquisition of British chip designer Arm doesn’t take place.
“Nvidia is definitely going to be huge,” Huang replied on Mad Money when asked by Jim Cramer, the show host. Cramer asked the executive how investors should feel about Nvidia long term while the $ 40 billion deal to purchase Arm owned by Softbank is pending.
Numerous companies across the tech landscape, including California-based chipmaker Qualcomm and Microsoft, have reportedly told the Federal Trade Commission that they are concerned that the Nvidia arm deal could affect competition. The FTC, the US antitrust agency, has opened an “in-depth investigation” into the takeover, Bloomberg reported earlier this month.
Nvidia, known for its gaming graphics chips, first announced the deal in September. Shortly after it was released, Cramer told Mad Money viewers that “if Nvidia Arm Holdings can close, the stock will be unstoppable after its great multi-year run.”
Nvidia stock is up 103% in the past 12 months, compared to the S&P 500, up 22.4%. Over the past five years, the chipmaker’s shares are up nearly 1,600%.
Huang said Thursday that Nvidia’s chips will remain at the core of numerous disruptive technologies, keeping the secular tailwind in tact. A day earlier, the company had quarterly revenue of $ 5 billion, up 61% year over year. Both sales and earnings exceeded Wall Street’s expectations.
“The growth opportunities ahead for artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, manufacturing, industrial robotics, and 5G Edge will make us a very large company,” said Huang, who founded Nvidia in 1993, California. “I think our growth path is very exciting … We expect it to be a great year of growth for the data center, and all of this is independent of Arm,” added Huang.
At the same time, Huang was also trying to defend Nvidia’s desire to buy Arm, known for developing the chip architecture used in most of the world’s cell phones.
“We’re going to be able to give Arm so much exciting and so much technical scale to expedite their roadmap that the ecosystem will love,” he said, adding, “We’re going to get this deal done. I’m very much into that confident. ”
Last year, Nvidia completed a $ 7 billion acquisition of chip maker Mellanox Technologies. It took Chinese regulators more than 13 months to review the deal.
Nvidia shares closed more than 8% on Thursday, which was a difficult session for many tech companies as investors digested rising bond yields.
Disclosure: Cramer’s charitable foundation owns shares in Nvidia.