NVIDIA being a well known hostile company, the industry did not miss the news about its ARM purchase intent. And thus they looked for alternatives. That's RISC-V.
Today, pretty much every company designing microcontrollers or SoCs is involved with RISC-V. They won't cancel those efforts to embrace ARM again.
It's hard to survive a bodged takeover attempt, much less an actual takeover.
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.
If the rumor Softbank wants to IPO ARM is correct, there will be pressure to get all the fundamental metrics of the business pointing up and to the right to maximize the valuation of the IPO. The increased proceeds from a good ARM IPO vs just an 'okay' IPO would likely swamp any potential cash that Softbank might be able to milk from ARM in the short-term.
It will be interesting to see how much of ARM Softbank intends to offer in the IPO vs how much they might continue to hold.
I think an IPO might be the only exit strategy Softbank has for ARM.
A European company with lots of money. China will make noise if a US company wants Arm.
Arm will be acquired by Volkswagen, you read here first !
Apple aside, laptop and desktop sales are still x86's to lose, so unless both Intel and AMD take major stumbles, I dont see ARM shipping in much more volume in PCs than it does now.
If Intel/AMD can achieve even half of Apple's power efficiency on laptop/desktop ARM isn't going anywhere on client anytime soon.
Apple will probably mess with it for 10 years like they did PowerPC until industry comes up with something totally new and revolutionary and then we will see a convergence on consumer devices across the board to whatever that is.
Everyone that wants an arch license has one (Intel, AMD, Apple, QC, Mediatek, Broadcom, Marvel, Huawei, Samsung, etc) and doesn't have to put down cash, they can just poach ARMs best chip designers away from them. ARM gets to strangle the $10 landfill router market until RISC-V takes over.
You talk about the $30b case as if a retail is taking higher risk/return portfolio but putting the entire $30b is not the same as buying something that looks promising with your phone.
If you can't fill the $30b into an asset, it's at 0%.
On the other hand, RISC-V seems to be used so far primarily as a stalking horse to keep ARM in line.
In terms of "if the deal fails", yes. If the deal succeeds, they made out like bandits.