Jokes aside, I don't believe Oracle would evolve the A1s beyond what they need, and stagnate them for years instead.
Right now ARM is in a golden position to take server market pieces, higher compute densities with simpler i-set and good software support thanks to years of mobile and now Apple support (most language implementators wants things to run on Mac's so bugs and perf have been getting fixed)
If Oracle would've bought them, third parties (in this case including both Microsoft with Azure and Google) would probably have held back on ARM investments (not to mention smaller operators), Qualcomm being in lawsuit mode would also had sown doubt, maybe some other manufacturer would introduce chips in the meanwhile but they would be small and given time Risc-V might even pop up on the horizon as an alternative hurting ARM on server chances even more.
Now they're "independant", with better software support than ever, guaranteeing availability to smaller parties (at a time when many of those are outside the US and wanting alternatives) and a chance to benefit from vertical integration.
So where are the others that supposedly are better than them?
In this case, Softbank will be having ARM and Ampere.
In that case, we have the CPU manufacturers, which already do this as the business, Google, which is not that interested, or already make their own chips, Apple, which has an in-house CPU/GPU company, and probably IBM, which also designs and builds their own processors.
So, the only interested shopper in the vicinity is Oracle, and they happen to have the money. The others have the money, but not the interest.
I think the fear is that if Oracle was the purchaser, then that would be good for Oracle, but not necessarily the rest of the ARM ecosystem. Given Softbank’s ARM investment, it is in their interest to try to keep the ecosystem healthy.
In the specific case of Ampere it remains to be seen, it wasn't that healthy also.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/26/oracle_ampere_stake_c...
They were shipping new systems (M8) based on a consistent in-house evolution of SPARC almost 8 years after the acquisition, a veritable eternity in tech time.
Eventually the market just said, no, we want x64 and a path to Cloud.
One wonders if they’d kept at it for a few more years whether they’d have needed to bid for Altera at all, given the gaps opened up by Intel’s struggles.