A merger is a contract :)

The problem is when some companies form a cartel of sort (with our without contracts) anyway. The same way Intel was not licensing x86, but since AMD already had it they were both incentivized to keep users on x86 and keep arm out.

(Of course the nvidia-arm acquisition is more about nvidia trying to build an army, oh pardon, portfolio. As Intel and AMD already have. They acquired Mellanox, plus they have GPUs and CUDA chips. Intel and Apple kind of have everything of course. AMD has Radeon, but AMD is probably still trying to catch up financially. There's also Qualcomm with their snapdragons and modems. And there are probably others, but the important thing is that snapdragons are arm based. And while selling high-end ML and gamer/miner cards is certainly not bad, but nvidia is probably trying to expand into a different market too, let's say high-volume but older semi tech.)

Indeed, but while most contract arrangements need to be explicitly re-upped, a merger is permanent; a subsumed company cannot un-merge itself, because it no longer exists as an independent entity. This fact incentivizes both sides to remain competitive, because each side knows that they are replaceable if they don't keep costs down and quality up relative to their competitors. Furthermore, while a cartel is the worst-case scenario between two independent companies, cartel-like behavior is the only scenario for two merged companies; it's unfathomable that any subsumed company could decide not to do whatever its new owner tells it to.

How is SoftBank selling ARM? (And how did Google acquire Motorola and then sell them off to Lenovo, for instance?) Is there a difference between how they acquired ARM and how Nvidia wants to acquire ARM that makes it a merger instead of an acquisition or something? I honestly don't know and am curious and think there's an interesting point here if how I'm interpreting your comment is correct.