Why Nvidia Stock Stumbled on Tuesday?

$NVIDIA (NVDA.US)$ Shares of semiconductor stock Nvidia slipped in morning trading on Tuesday, possibly because investors are worrying that after Nvidia failed to acquire Arm Holdings earlier this year, one or more of its rivals might succeed in gaining control of Arm.

Nvidia rival and Arm Holdings customer $Qualcomm (QCOM.US)$ is looking to buy a stake in Arm when owner $SOFTBANK GROUP CORP (SFTBF.US)$ conducts an IPO for that semiconductor subsidiary later this year. Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon even suggested that Qualcomm might try to acquire Arm Holdings in its entirety by forming a consortium with other chip companies to raise the tens of billions of dollars that such a move might require.

Neither of these scenarios sound like particularly bad news for Nvidia, though. On the one hand, if Qualcomm buys a piece of Arm, this will not prevent Nvidia from continuing to benefit from licensing access to Arm technology itself. The same is true under the consortium scenario -- assuming, at least, that Nvidia joins the consortium.