• Cellnex girds its M&A loins
• Huawei faces ‘de facto’ ban in France
• Nvidia could muscle in on ARM

Cellnex’s bulging warchest, a mauvais jour for Huawei and M&A speculation take the best seats in this theatre of industry news items.  

• Cellnex, which has become the largest independent telecom towers company in Europe on the back of a string of acquisitions, is raising about €4 billion from the issue of new shares to help fund further acquisitions that could be valued at up to €11 billion. Earlier this week the company announced positive financials for the first half of the year and a small, strategic acquisition that gives it a foot in the private networks market. 
• The clock could be ticking for Huawei in France, according to Reuters, which reports that the country’s authorities are introducing licensing measures that amount to a de facto ban on the use of Huawei networking gear after 2028. The speculation comes only days after the UK performed a volte face over the Chinese vendor's potential involvement in British 5G networks.
• Nvidia is reportedly mulling the acquisition of ARM, which has been put up for sale by current owner SoftBank. Such a move would shake up the chip industry and pitch Nvidia in greater competition with Intel and AMD. But selling to Nvidia is far from SoftBank’s only option, as an IPO of ARM, selling to another company, or even holding onto the chip technology specialist are all possibilities. 
• SD-WAN specialist Aryaka has forged a partnership with security vendor Check Point Software Technologies that will see the companies combine Aryaka’s SD-WAN solution with Check Point’s CloudGuard Connect and CloudGuard Edge tools. This has been quite the week for bolstering SD-WAN with additional security capabilities, as it comes only days after Fortinet announced the acquisition of OPAQ Networks to bolster its secure SD-WAN offering and propel it into the Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) sector. For more details on the Aryaka/Check Point relationship, see this announcement.
• AT&T says its 5G network is now available “nationwide.” The announcement came as the giant US operator reported a near 9% year-on-year dip in second quarter revenues to $40.95 billion. 
• Meanwhile, T-Mobile has thrown down the 5G gauntlet to AT&T and Verizon again by including a range of deals as it announced that, following its merger with Sprint earlier this year, the operator will use only the T-Mobile brand from 2 August. The Sprint brand has run its race, you could say.
• Microsoft reported a 13% year-on-year increase in fiscal fourth quarter revenues to $38 billion driven mainly by growing demand for its Azure cloud services.

- The staff, TelecomTV