Arm reportedly set to cancel Qualcomm chip design license

Arm and Qualcomm have been in a war for quite a while now over Qualcomm’s Oryon cores. These cores are used in the Snapdragon X series and, now, the Snapdragon 8 Elite. To give a brief overview of the situation, Qualcomm purchased Nuvia, a start-up developing Arm-compatible custom cores aimed at servers. After Qualcomm made that purchase, Arm claims that the cores Qualcomm calls “Oryon” are iterations upon those initial designs. Arm claims to have given Nuvia “substantial, crucial, and individualized support” in making those cores, which in effect, means that Arm helped to create its own competitor given that those cores are why Qualcomm will be using fewer off-the-shelf Arm cores. Arm also says that Qualcomm would have needed permission to transfer and use Nuvia’s designs.

Arm has gone so far as to claim that it wants all Snapdragon X Elite laptops destroyed, but things have reportedly taken an even nastier turn. According to Bloomberg, Arm is cancelling a longstanding license deal that gave Qualcomm permission to use Arm IP when designing chips, escalating the dispute even further and potentially disrupting sales of the company’s chips that make it roughly $39 billion in annual revenue.

Arm is raising the stakes

Qualcomm has eight weeks to respond

According to the report, the license cancellation will complete in 60-days, and Arm is giving Qualcomm eight weeks to respond and attempt to remedy the dispute. The legal battle started in 2022 when Arm sued Qualcomm over its acquisition of Nuvia, and the battle has been drawn out ever since. Both companies argue that they’re correct, and a trial is set to take place in Delaware come this December.

Given how cooperative both companies have been in the past with each other, it’s expected that both entities will reach a settlement agreement ahead of the trial. Arm did not respond to a request for comment at the time of writing, but Qualcomm provided the following emailed statement.

This is more of the same from ARM – more unfounded threats designed to strongarm a longtime partner, interfere with our performance-leading CPUs, and increase royalty rates regardless of the broad rights under our architecture license. With a trial fast approaching in December, Arm’s desperate ploy appears to be an attempt to disrupt the legal process, and its claim for termination is completely baseless. We are confident that Qualcomm’s rights under its agreement with Arm will be affirmed. Arm’s anticompetitive conduct will not be tolerated.

We will update this article with any further statements.

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