How Nvidia’s CEO cooked up America’s biggest semiconductor company

In the midst of the pandemic, Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Jensen Huang engineered his company’s biggest game changer from his kitchen: a $40 billion acquisition that could cement his status as the semiconductor industry’s hottest CEO.

The proposed acquisition of Arm Holdings from SoftBank Group Corp., in the chip industry’s biggest deal ever, would transform Nvidia into a force across the most important arenas of computing, from servers and PCs to consumer electronics to smartphones, making it one of the most formidable threatsIntel Corp. has ever faced. To do so, though, Mr. Huang still needs to clear regulatory hurdles and potential opposition from competitors that may appeal to authorities to block the deal.