The deal in question was signed half a year ago between Broadcom, an American developer of chips and infrastructure software, and VMware, another American company that specializes in virtualization – that is, running software in an environment that simulates certain configurations of computing and is isolated from the physical computer on which they run. VMware, which until now was owned by Michael Dell (founder and CEO of Dell Technologies), agreed to be sold to Broadcom for $61 billion – making it the third-highest deal in high-tech history, after Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision-Blizzard earlier this year for about $69 billion and Dell’s acquisition of EMC in the previous decade for $67 billion, and before AMD’s acquisition of Xilinx last year for $49 billion.
More in-
Britain is not the first territory to announce an investigation into the deal – last week the European Commission announced a similar investigation, and last month the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the US stated that it had completed an initial investigation and decided to proceed to a second phase of investigation. However, neither of these two authorities As dangerous as the British, who in the past year have already resulted in the cancellation of three huge high-tech deals: last year (and again this year, after an appeal) they ordered Facebook to sell the Giphy website, which the latter purchased for $400 million; throughout this year they were the main force leading the international investigations (in the US, Europe, China and other countries) into the giant deal for the acquisition of ARM by Nvidia for $44 billion, which was finally canceled due to the desperation of the companies from what seemed like international opposition that would not be appeased; And last week, the Dutch chip company Nexpria was ordered to sell the largest chip factory in Great Britain, due to the fact that the buyer is controlled by China.