Nvidia’s $40bn proposed acquisition of ARM represents a greater threat to the UK-based company’s unique model, and to the ecosystem it has enabled, than its previous takeover, by Japan’s Softbank, which bought ARM in 2016 for $31bn. This summer, UK politicians were echoing their counterparts in the USA, Japan and elsewhere and calling for development of more homegrown 5G technology and intellectual property to reduce reliance on Huawei. In the UK, this just evoked a sad sense of lost opportunity, and memories of how all the technology that has been developed at home, only to be lost to acquisition or lack of support. One of the greatest losses to ‘UK plc’, and indeed ‘UK 5G’, was ARM, when it was…