NVidia will license their GPU cores to other hardware manufacturers

Also, whether anyone licenses their hardware in the first place depends on how expensive it is and how much power it sucks down. Remember that we're talking about a full desktop GPU architecture here, the lowest power GPU that currently uses it consumes more power than an entire tablet. NVidia have screwed this up before, and given all the NRE costs of creating a new chip I can't see anyone going for this until they can test the actual power consumption in actual hardware.

No developer would do that unless the development was entirely sponsored by nvidia. There are almost a billion mobile devices out there, a substantial portion running OpenGL ES 2.0. There are a small number of tegra-optimized game variants that add absolutely trivial changes in return for some nvidia sponsorship dollars, but no one is going to bother with an exclusive for a single chipset.

Reading your post someone might think that nvidia has some clear advantage in mobile graphics and this is the big chance to make it big. They absolutely have no such thing, being seriously contested if not beaten by PowerVR and even ARM designs (of course nvidia does great things on the desktop, but having strength in 150W desktop GPUs does not translate into the same in sub-Watt GPUs). nvidia has had a lot of talk but a serious lack of actual delivery.

What is being discussed in the link is actually licensing the GPU design itself, which would allow other companies to fabricate their own Nvidia GPU containing chips. This allows third parties to produce system on a chip designs (SoC) which incorporate Nvidia GPUs connected to other stuff, perhaps a few ARM cores or some custom DSPs or similar.

This is the approach that ARM currently take with their designs. They don't operate any fabs, but simply sell what's known as the "IP Core" to third parties (Qualcomm, Broadcom, Texas Instruments etc...)

I don't think anyone will want to produce exactly an nVidia chip, most likely the idea is that other vendors would want to integrate an nVidia GPU core on their mobile SoC (Kepler as an architecture is supposed to scale from mobile to cluster computing sizes) - perhaps Qualcomm or Apple, or hell, maybe even AMD now that they're starting to put out ARM chips. Heck, it'd be pretty interesting if Intel put integrated Geforce cores on their next gen CPUs, at least as an option. Although most likely neither AMD nor Intel would bother since they've got their own fairly strong mobile GPU architectures now and figuring out how to integrate an nVidia core would probably be more work for dubious gain.

NVIDIA GPUs are fabricated by TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company). NVIDIA never owned its own fab. The only difference is that now instead of keeping their IP cores secret they are willing to license them for a (probably huge) fee. Whoever licenses the core would probably also use TSMC for fabrication.

The distinction now is that in addition to buying fabricated chips, you can license the GPUs directly so you can manufacture in tighter ways.