Are there any strong reactions to this proposal ?
Is Linux likely to gain or loose anything in particular if $40Bn sale is allowed to go through ?
Might it give Arm development a financial boost that trickles benenfits down to Linux or puts up more barriers ?

I don't know about the Linux impact but, as a limey, I have serious reservations about losing control of such a key technological asset. I cannot imagine the US Dept of Commerce permitting a foreign power to gian control of Intel or AMD.

That ship already sailed - ARM was already sold to Softbank Corporation, based in Japan, in 2016...

Four years later and they are selling it on... no real surprises there.

Softbank also approached the likes of Apple and Samsung among others to find a buyer for ARM.

The real problem: The UK government allowed the sale of hugely important home grown technology company to foreign venture capitalists - Nvidia now being the likely buyer is just an obvious consequence of that earlier bad decision.

It's a typical tale of corporate greed. With ARM Holdings and it's shareholders and the UK government being squarely to blame, rather than Nvidia.

Re #3
In complete agreement; I was concerned at the time about the sale to Softbank. Once ARM was back on the market, the government could at least have bought a controlling interest or insisted on a golden share; they had shed loads of dosh to chuck around on furlough payments. I have nothing against NVIDIA. And Brexit has been dominated by fishing quotas, a mere 0.1% of the economy with little or no strategic importance. Yet ARM can be dumped with virtually no comment from government, BBC or the media. Aerospace, automotive and pharmaceutical sectors next? People are more animated by job losses in Pret a Manger. As an engineer, I despair of this country.

Nvidia have gotten a huge amount of flack in Linux circles due to comments from Torvalds. It's just fashionable to bash Nvidia because they don't contribute a FOSS video driver stack rhe kernel. Most of the critics just don't get that none of the big chip venfors produce open hardware and AMD's graphics solutions depend on closed source firmware for the basic acceleration on offer (compared to MS Windows). Torvalds would have kept his mouth shut if Nvidua were a big donor to the Linux Foundation.

Unlike AMD, Nvidia produced and suoported a functional and robust UNIX driver for well over a decade and provided decent support (including legacy support).

I believe Nvidia are already heavily invested with ARM as it is, with the Tegra chips and have been comitting to the Android branch of the kernel.