Will Nvidia buy Arm? According to a Bloomberg report, the United States' largest chipmaker is not only interested, it has entered into "advanced talks" to take the British chip designer off Japanese conglomerate SoftBank's hands for more than $32 billion.

Citing people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg reports Nvidia aims to reach a deal with SoftBank within the next few weeks.

Nvidia’s interest in Arm comes at a time when the chipmaker, best known for its GPU technologies, is rapidly expanding into new verticals including cloud, AI compute, and switching.

Nvidia is also an existing Arm customer having licensed the chipmaker's architectures for various products including its mobile Tegra offering, which is famously used in Nintendo's Switch game console.

While Arm's chip designs are used in nearly every mobile device today, the company's portfolio now extends well beyond consumer electronics. The chip designer has developed architectures that run the gamut from ultra-low power chips for IoT to 128-core, 250-watt data center chips. In fact, Arm-based processors are now used by multiple public cloud providers, including Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle.

These trends drove Nvidia to extend CUDA support to Arm processors last fall during the 2019 Super Computing conference in Denver.

If talks go well and Nvidia enters into an agreement to purchase Arm, the chipmaker will likely face regulatory hurdles.

The Bloomberg report comes just weeks after The Wall Street Journal reported SoftBank was weighing Arm's future, considering everything from a full or partial sale of the chip designer to an initial public offering (IPO).

The possibility of Arm's return to the public market didn't come as much of a surprise. Since acquiring Arm for $32 billion in 2016, SoftBank has alluded to an IPO. However, The Wall Street Journal reports pressure from investor Elliot Management may have forced the conglomerate's hands in the matter.

And we may still see an Arm IPO yet if talks with Nvidia fall through. Bloomberg reports that Nvidia is the only suitor that has expressed a serious interest in buying the chip designer.

To date, SoftBank has pledged to sell $41 billion in assets to boost liquidity and fund a major stock-buyback program. As part of this effort, the company signaled its retreat from the U.S. wireless market earlier this spring.

SoftBank entered the U.S. cellular market in 2012 after the company made a $22 billion investment in Sprint. Following the successful Sprint, T-Mobile merger earlier this spring, SoftBank held a 25% stake in the combined company, which it now plans to sell to the carrier’s majority shareholder, Deutsche Telekom.