Arm Moves to Cancel Qualcomm’s Chip Design License, Escalating Dispute

Arm Holdings, which licences its Arm CPU architecture to chip design firms including Qualcomm, MediaTek, Samsung and Apple, has issued a notice to Qualcomm terminating its architectural licence in 60 days, as reported by Bloomberg. The move escalates a dispute over Qualcomm’s acquisition of chip design startup Nuvia in 2021, which Arm says violated its licensing terms with both sides. Nuvia’s intellectual property is the basis of Qualcomm’s custom-designed Oryon CPU cores, used in the Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus series of laptop CPUs as well as the just-announced Snapdragon 8 Elite for flagship smartphones. 

Terminating Qualcomm’s architecture licence would mean the company has to immediately stop sales of these chips, forcing its partners in the laptop and smartphone industry to withdraw their products from sale. Qualcomm’s ability to manufacture and ship other chips, which use Arm’s own readymade Cortex CPU core designs, would remain unaffected. 

The timing of Arm’s move has come as an embarrassment to Qualcomm, which is currently hosting its Snapdragon Summit event in Hawaii, with journalists and industry analysts from all over the world in attendance. Qualcomm representatives have reportedly termed the move “anticompetitive”, “desperate” and “baseless”. 

The two companies are scheduled to appear in court in the US in December over the dispute, which began when Arm challenged Qualcomm’s acquisition of Nuvia. While Arm argued that its licence terms precluded Qualcomm from using Nuvia’s chip designs, and subsequently cancelled Nuvia’s licence, Qualcomm has maintained that it has the rights to do so. This recent move is being seen by some analysts as a tactic to compel Qualcomm to settle out of court. 

Nuvia, a much-hyped chip design startup founded by three ex-Apple chip designers and backed by leading Silicon Valley venture capital firms, burst onto the scene in 2019, with plans to develop an entirely new Arm-based CPU core architecture – an undertaking so huge and risky that few established companies could take it on themselves. Aiming to upend the consumer and data centre industries at a time when demand for performance and power efficiency was skyrocketing, Nuvia was a prime target for acquisition as soon as it began showing off successful designs. 

It was acquired by Qualcomm for $1.4 billion and immediately positioned as a solution to Qualcomm’s previously unsuccessful attempts to break into the PC market. Having announced its Windows-on-Arm strategy in 2017, the company was unable to deliver enough performance, power efficiency and compatibility to seriously challenge Intel and AMD.

However, the Snapdragon X Elite processor, with Oryon cores derived from Nuvia’s work, has been able to break into the market. Qualcomm and Microsoft launched the Copilot+ laptop category earlier this year with nearly every major laptop manufacturer. These laptops deliver on-device AI, excellent battery life, and good enough performance for casual gaming, as we saw in our Asus Vivobook S 15 (2024) review. Other Arm licensees including MediaTek are expected to enter the Windows-on-Arm race in 2025.