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Nvidia has had modern ARM chips (the Tegra series among other) for at least a decade now. Any company can license ARM tech.

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The top level comment was about companies owning a CPU and GPU stack. NVIDIA licenses ARM IP now, if they bought ARM they would actually own the designs, putting them on the level of AMD and Intel where they would have greater control over the technology.

Just licensing the designs puts a company on a lower chipmaking tier with Qualcomm, Samsung, Apple, Huawei, etc.

> NVIDIA licenses ARM IP now, if they bought ARM they would actually own the designs

NVIDIA Carmel is NVIDIA's own Arm v8.2-A design [0]. They only licence the architecture. The core is quite interesting, as it's doing dynamic recompilation for an underlying VLIW architecture.

However, NVIDIA Orin[1] (followup for Tegra Xavier) will use a Cortex-A78 core[2] (formerly Hercules) licenced from ARM.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Denver

[1] https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-introduces-drive-a....

[2] https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/arm_holdings/microarchitectures...

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