According to an anonymous "industry leader" quoted by the Korea Times, Samsung Electronics is considering acquiring a small stake in Arm Holdings. Samsung apparently does not intend to own a controlling stake in the company, but rather a 3% to 5% stake, but is trying to acquire Arm as part of a larger consortium.

There are several advantages to Samsung investing in Arm, but the main one would be reduced licensing fees for manufacturing Arm-based chips. Since Samsung's Exynos chips are Arm-based and are used in many of its products, including its smartphone series, it certainly makes sense to reduce royalties.

Arm is currently owned by Japanese tech giant Softbank. The company acquired Arm for $32 billion in 2016 as part of its Vision Fund initiative. SoftBank is considering either selling Arm or an initial public offering as the company's $100 billion Vision Fund recently posted losses for two consecutive quarters in an attempt to raise cold hard cash.

A recent Bloomberg report suggested that Nvidia was preparing to acquire Arm soon, but that now seems less likely. Can a company that already produces Arm-based chips acquire Arm? There is also the question of whether Nvidia can come up with the large sum of $41 billion that Softbank is asking for. Apparently $41 billion. [Arm's designs are used by Samsung, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Apple, and many others, and chips based on Arm's designs are found in everything from smartphones to tablets to TVs.

What does this mean for us PC gamers? Probably little, and definitely nothing in the short term, but Apple's recent announcement that they are dropping x86 in favor of Arm opens up the possibility of Arm opening up new markets. If Nvidia were to acquire the design business, it would be a shift away from the GPU-driven business we know, but it would still likely be business as usual for the GeForce side.

Samsung's stock purchase would make even less sense, but then again, it is said to be part of a larger consortium interested in the chip business. Perhaps we will see some more familiar names and faces interested in a slice of the Arm pie.