Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC on Thursday he was confident in the company’s growth story, even if its potential blockbuster acquisition of British chip designer Arm does not happen.
“Nvidia is going to be huge no matter what,” Huang said on “Mad Money,” in response to a question from Jim Cramer, the show’s host. Cramer asked the executive how investors should think about Nvidia over the long-term while its $40 billion deal to buy Softbank-owned Arm remained pending.
Numerous companies across the tech landscape, including California-based chipmaker Qualcomm and Microsoft, have reportedly told the Federal Trade Commission they were concerned about 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 it was publicized, Cramer told “Mad Money” viewers that if “Nvidia can close on Arm Holdings, the stock’s gonna be unstoppable even after its magnificent multiyear run.”
Nvidia stock has advanced 103% in the past 12 months, compared with a gain of 22.4% for the S&P 500. Over the past five years, the chipmaker’s shares are up nearly 1,600%.
Huang said Thursday that Nvidia’s chips remain core to numerous disruptive technologies, keeping its secular tailwinds in tact. A day earlier, the company reported quarterly sales of $5 billion, which represented year-over-year growth of 61%. Both revenue and earnings topped Wall Street expectations.
“The growth opportunity ahead of us for artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, manufacturing, industrial robotics, 5G edge, those applications are going to make us a very large company,” contended Huang, who founded California-based Nvidia in 1993. “I think our growth trajectory is very exciting. … We expect it to be a great growth year for data center, and all of that is independent of Arm,” Huang added.
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’re going to be able to inject so much exciting and so much engineering scale into Arm to accelerate their roadmap, which the ecosystem is going to love,” he said, adding: “We’re going to get this deal done. I’m very confident in that.”
Last year, Nvidia completed a $7 billion acquisition of chip producer Mellanox Technologies. It took more than 13 months to complete as Chinese regulators scrutinized the deal.
Shares of Nvidia closed down more than 8% Thursday, which proved to a difficult session for many tech companies as investors digested rising bond yields.
Disclosure: Cramer’s charitable trust owns shares of Nvidia.
