Apparently they're not in a great place since first the Softbank acquisition, then the Nvidia deal falling through, and now trying to pump up the valuation for an IPO.

I'd agree that NASA using ARM would probably be neutral for them, but NASA using SiFive is decidedly not neutral for their valuation. ARM has sort of been banking on the talking point that RISC-V is not mature enough for common use yet. A core being mature enough for NASA sends the opposite message pretty clearly.

I'm not sure how that's possible, especially with something like Tesla having a 500B valuation. If Tesla disappears, by large nothing changes. If ARM goes under, the entirety of the modern world screeches to a halt within a year.

Though it is surprising that they're even still a private company at this point.

Their valuation is somewhere between $25B to $35B. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-09/arm-s-ipo...

They won't go under, but apparently Softbank will lose money on the whole thing if it's on the low end of that spectrum.

And yeah, valuations can be about investor hype more than any basis in reality. And Tesla has almost as much hype as NFTs did a year ago.

ARM is much more than just smartphone chips, and their embedded market share is under serious threat from RISC-V.

They're as much under threat from RISC-V as the Nvidia hegemony is from Intel Arc. Hardly any at all.