What does that mean ? I am huge fan of Nvidia. Loved it on my PC Desktop.
We don't know, which is part of the problem.
There are various reasons for tech companies to buy other tech companies
1) Simple investment. ARM powers much of the world and that number is only set to grow (PC is not exactly a growth market at this point) so Nvidia can either take a cut of the profits or keep it to sell on in 10 years when it is worth 400 billion.
2) Control of the tech. See above about how much of the market ARM has on lock. If Nvidia can swoop in and say "no, do it this way" or "no AMD/intel/microsoft/apple/google you get to pay me lots of money to play here" then yeah.
3) Patent farms. Patents are a quite broken in many ways right now. Sitting on a massive pool of them can be a protection if say Apple came knocking when Nvidia makes an android phone in a year or two they can turn around and say "do you want to go there because we will go nuclear" and then Apple is out however many years of development in ARM (all the developers, all the software, all the devs inside apple that know things... all now legacy only and needing retraining), has to switch to a new processor family (not many options there) and potentially has to source old parts from somewhere else...
As they nominally own the tech then they also don't have to pay fees (
https://www.arm.com/why-arm/how-licensing-works , which do look like it is per device), unless their accountant reckons it is a nice tax writeoff or does not want to burden ARM if it is kept as a separate business.
4) Tech building. ARM is quite famously a fabless tech company (that is to say they don't have any fabrication options and just sell designs, compared to something like Intel that do have factories all over the world, some of which I have visited and they are very impressive and very expensive to build) but in some cases a company might have a factory that can build stuff. It can be cheaper, almost certainly will be quicker (between building, planning, getting the machinery, environmental regs, staffing the place and whatnot it is not a quick process).
That said ARM presumably has a lot of good people working for them, indeed it is not presumably as many hold ARM up as a great employer to work for. They don't exactly make experienced and time tested hardware designers every day (you might find one or two in schools you can train up over the next 5 or so years but it is generally an expensive and time consuming process to find good people, buying a company and getting a bunch of them then often representing a good deal to get them now).
They have claimed they are going to keep it a separate business (can make it easier to sell when the time comes, and dodges certain regulatory issues) but at the same time how often have we seen Microsoft, Google, Apple or the like buy a promising tech company and bury them to either avoid competition or because they changed direction?
