That's actually an interesting side-effect. What happens to ARM now? New players who are looking for a long-term strategy are looking at RISC-V (as you note) i

That's actually an interesting side-effect. What happens to ARM now? New players who are looking for a long-term strategy are looking at RISC-V (as you note) in part due to Nvidia's reputation. Despite the deal being quashed, they're probably going to continue along that route. However, it seems like ARM licensees might also be making plans to become less dependent on ARM (the company). The Nvidia/ARM deal was announced September 2020. Qualcomm announced that it was going to buy Nuvia (founded by ex-Apple Silicon people) in January 2021 along with plans to launch their own internally-designed CPUs (rather than relying on ARM reference designs). I think this is a smart plan regardless of the Nvidia/ARM deal, but creating your own cores means that ARM has little-to-no leverage over you. You don't need their new CPUs. Sure, ARM still updates their architecture periodically, but you can happily continue along making your own CPUs under a perpetual license. Qualcomm is making the jump to its own cores so that it doesn't need ARM reference designs. SoftBank is somewhat souring on ARM since it isn't getting the huge returns it was expecting by owning the CPU that everyone was going to use in the future. Will SoftBank end up short-changing R&D at ARM making their reference cores less competitive with Apple Silicon and future Qualcomm cores? Even if SoftBank was able to sell ARM for $40B, they bought the company for $31-32B in 2016. Basically, the sale meant only 5% annual returns which is pretty bad compared to the huge gains an index fund would have made during that time. I think there's going to be pressure to find a way to squeeze money out of ARM. Heck, with Qualcomm moving away from ARM reference cores, that's a lot less revenue for ARM. Even if Qualcomm cores aren't better, Qualcomm is still a huge portion of the mobile CPU market. Every ARM CPU maker that starts making their own custom cores means less revenue for the reference designs and less reason for ARM to invest in those reference designs. If ARM starts reducing investment in their reference designs a bit, that will put pressure on more companies to create their own custom cores. The sky isn't falling and I don't want this comment to sound like that. I think ARM has a fine, sustainable business. At the same time, it seems like there will be pressure from SoftBank given the lackluster returns even with the Nvidia deal and Qualcomm buying Nuvia puts further pressure on ARM and it's hard to justify a major investment in something that is likely to continue having lackluster returns.