Arm Escalates Legal Feud With Qualcomm —Terminates Snapdragon X Elite License

• Arm is revoking its licensing agreement with Qualcomm.
• The move comes amid a fierce legal battle between the two tech giants.
• Qualcomm risks losing over $39 billion in revenue if the license is revoked.

SoftBank Group’s Arm has announced it will revoke U.S. chipmaker Qualcomm’s chip design license amid the AI heavyweights’ legal battle.

Qualcomm said the move was a “strong-arm” tactic that could potentially cost the company billions of dollars in revenue.

Arm Terminates License

Bloomberg reported  the feud over a license revocation that would result in Qualcomm losing the ability to sell and create its own chips.

Arm’s architecture, which has been used to develop over 230 billion chips  since 2003, is used in laptops, tablets, and around 99% of the world’s premium smartphones.

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors are currently used in most Android smartphones, laptops, and gaming devices.

A license revocation would mean that Qualcomm would lose the ability to sell this product, which currently generates the company over $39 billion in revenue.

Arm V. Qualcomm

U.K.-based Arm has been embroiled in a legal dispute  since 2022 when it accused Qualcomm of breaching its licensing agreements in its $1.4 billion acquisition of chip designer Nuvia.

Specifically, Arm claimed that the licenses it granted to Nuvia for its custom chip designs were non-transferable.

Therefore, once Qualcomm acquired the firm, Arm argued that the U.S. chipmaker needed to negotiate a new licensing deal rather than continue to use Nuvia’s licenses.

Arm alleged that Qualcomm’s use of the Nuvia-designed chips without a new agreement violated intellectual property rights.

Qualcomm and Arm Drifting Apart

For over two decades, Qualcomm and Arm have worked closely together.

Qualcomm’s success in the mobile industry was built on the efficiency and performance of Arm’s architecture. At the same time, Arm benefited from Qualcomm’s ability to scale the designs into some of the most popular consumer products globally.

The U.S. chipmaker signed its first license with Arm in 1995. Since then, the company has renewed and expanded its licensing agreements with the chip designer.

However, Arm’s 2016 acquisition by Japan’s SoftBank and the company’s work towards an IPO, which was completed in 2023, caused Arm to begin tightening control over its intellectual property.

Appointed in 2022, CEO Rene Haas has been more assertive about offering more complete solutions, especially in areas like AI and data centers. Qualcomm has also been increasingly working on its own designs, moving away from Arm’s blueprints.

The breakdown between the two companies highlights Big Tech’s race to remain competitive amid increased competition in the AI space.