US regulators have sued to block Nvidia’s multibillion-dollar acquisition of UK chip design company Arm from SoftBank, one of the most serious threats yet to a deal which has already hit a wall of scepticism from European and British authorities.

The Federal Trade Commission said in a statement on Thursday that the cash and stock transaction — which has a valuation of $82bn and would be the largest takeover of a semiconductor group — would give one of the world’s biggest chip groups control over computing technology and designs that competitors rely on to create their own chips.

The issues echo those flagged by UK regulators when they first expressed concerns about the deal in the summer. Nvidia will have both “the means and incentive to stifle innovative next-generation technologies”, the US agency alleged, pointing to concerns about automated driving systems, networking chips found in data centres and the large-scale facilities of cloud computing companies.