At the moment ARM lives or dies by the success of the ecosystem as a whole.
When its owned by a customer this may no longer be the case and there are huge potential conflicts of interest. For example, would an Nvidia owned ARM offer a new license to a firm that would be a significant competitor to an existing Nvidia product (eg Tegra)? Will Nvidia hinder the development efforts of other competitors? Will Nvidia give itself access to new designs first? How will it maintain appropriate barriers to the flow of information about competitors new designs to its own design teams?
I can see this getting very significant regulatory scrutiny and rightly so.
China is already aware and aiming to supply 70% of their own demand for chips. [0]. Thanks to that, we might also see a rise in RISCV chips [1] which could even get the attention of other states besides China and India.
I think Trump started something unintentionally that might put other countries in a better position to deal with the American semiconductor hegemony 5-10 years from now.
IMO, Nvidia should be allowed to buy ARM just for it to get bad enough for people to want to buy non NVIDIA products. For years NVIDIA has had shitty business practices, but I bet most people on HN (and the rest of the world) don't give 2 shits about competition and market leadership. They just buy NVIDIA because it's the standard.
Things have to get worse before the get better. It's really, the only way humans and the public seem to be able to learn.
At the moment ARM lives or dies by the success of the ecosystem as a whole.
When its owned by a customer this may no longer be the case and there are huge potential conflicts of interest. For example, would an Nvidia owned ARM offer a new license to a firm that would be a significant competitor to an existing Nvidia product (eg Tegra)? Will Nvidia hinder the development efforts of other competitors? Will Nvidia give itself access to new designs first? How will it maintain appropriate barriers to the flow of information about competitors new designs to its own design teams?
I can see this getting very significant regulatory scrutiny and rightly so.