Report: Arm cancels Qualcomm’s architecture license, endangering its chip business

Any company that makes Arm chips must license technology from Arm Holdings plc, the British company that develops the instruction set. Companies can license the instruction set and create their own CPU designs or license one of Arm’s ready-made Cortex CPU core designs to incorporate into their own chips.

Bloomberg reports that Arm is canceling Qualcomm’s license, an escalation of a fight that began in late 2022 when Arm sued Qualcomm over its acquisition of Nuvia in 2021. Arm has given Qualcomm 60 days’ notice of the cancellation, giving the companies two months to come to some kind of agreement before Qualcomm is forced to stop manufacturing and selling its Arm chips.

A Qualcomm spokesperson told Bloomberg that Arm Holdings plc was attempting to “strong-arm a longtime partner” and that Qualcomm was “confident that Qualcomm’s rights under its agreement with Arm will be affirmed.”

Qualcomm bought Nuvia to assist with developing high-performance Arm chips that could compete with x86 chips from Intel and AMD as well as Apple Silicon chips in iPhones and Macs—Nuvia was founded by people who had headed up Apple’s chip design team for years. Arm claimed that the acquisition “caused Nuvia to breach its Arm licenses,” and Arm demanded that Qualcomm and Nuvia destroy any designs that Nuvia had created pre-acquisition.