[Traster]

Nvidia absolutely could come up with their own ARM-based solutions like Apple did. Guess where all the people who know how to do that work? Arm. If nothing else, Arm offers a great engineering team to accelerate Nvidia's plans and it also means Nvidia can push new ideas into the latest ISAs much easier. A similar thing happened a few years ago with Imagination Technologies who produced Apple's GPU IP. Except instead of Apple buying them, Apple built an office next door and poached the entire engineering team. Leaving ImgTec as a deeply scarred company that eventually got sliced up and sold off.

[monocasa]

Nvidia has their own totally custom ARM cores. That team was leftovers from Transmeta.