The last time Qualcomm and Arm faced a jury, the verdict landed late on a Friday in a Delaware courtroom: Qualcomm had not breached its license. Two years on, the two companies are back in court, and the fight this time is over money and the reach of that license rather than whether it exists.
Qualcomm and Arm returned to court on October 5, Reuters reported, with a new round of litigation that puts the scale of damages and the scope of Arm’s licensing authority at the center of the case. The dispute is a continuation of a feud that has run for years through the semiconductor industry’s quietest and most important layer: the contracts that govern who may build chips around Arm’s instruction set, and on what terms.
The conflict began in 2022, when Arm sued Qualcomm over its acquisition of Nuvia, a chip-design startup founded by former Apple engineers. Arm argued that the purchase required Qualcomm to renegotiate Nuvia’s architecture license, and that Qualcomm had kept using technology developed under that license without Arm’s consent.
The first trial, held in December 2024, ended in a jury verdict that largely favored Qualcomm. Jurors found that Qualcomm had not breached Nuvia’s license agreement and that the chips built with Nuvia-derived technology were properly covered by Qualcomm’s own license with Arm. The jury deadlocked on whether Nuvia itself had breached its agreement before the acquisition, a loose end Arm has tried to keep alive.
Arm had once sought to force Qualcomm to halt sales of the chips, an outcome that would have rippled through the phone and laptop markets, then withdrew the demand. The new case is narrower and, in some ways, more consequential for Arm’s business: it is about how much Arm is owed and how far its license terms stretch.
The relationship matters well beyond the two companies. Arm’s designs sit inside nearly every smartphone chip on the market, and Qualcomm is among the largest buyers of Arm technology. The terms of their arrangement help determine how much of the value of an Arm-based chip flows back to Arm, which earns revenue through royalties and license fees, and how much stays with the chipmakers that design their own custom cores.
Qualcomm has bet heavily on the Nuvia technology. The custom CPU cores that came out of the acquisition, sold under the Oryon name, now power Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors for phones and laptops, and the company has pushed them into data-center chips aimed at the same market where Nvidia’s Arm-based processors are gaining ground.
Arm, owned by Japan’s SoftBank and publicly listed since 2023, has its own reasons to press for a larger share. The company has been moving up the stack, offering more complete chip designs that let customers buy more of Arm rather than build around it. A ruling that narrows Qualcomm’s license, or raises the price of it, would validate that strategy. A ruling that keeps Qualcomm’s terms intact would reinforce the position of chipmakers that design their own cores on Arm’s foundation.
The fight is playing out against a wider shift in the chip industry. Arm’s architecture, long confined to phones and embedded devices, has moved into the data center, where Apple, Amazon and Nvidia all build Arm-based processors. Arm has told investors it wants a larger cut of a market that is no longer defined by the smartphone.
The economics are also changing. Arm has signaled that it wants royalties tied more closely to the value of the finished chip rather than a flat fee per core, a move that would raise what Qualcomm and others pay. Qualcomm has resisted, arguing that its licenses were negotiated for a reason.
Analysts said the outcome will be read as a signal for the wider ARM ecosystem. If Arm succeeds in expanding what its licenses cover, other chipmakers could face the same renegotiation Qualcomm is fighting. If Qualcomm prevails, the custom-core model it pioneered, and that rivals are now copying, becomes cheaper to defend.
Neither company has said publicly what the new damages claim amounts to. Reuters reported that the numbers are large enough to be a focus of the proceedings, and the two sides have spent months in pretrial wrangling over what evidence a jury will see.
The case is also a test of a decades-old arrangement in which Arm licenses its architecture and the companies that license it build the chips. That arrangement made Arm ubiquitous and kept it out of direct competition with its customers.
The question now is whether the economics of that bargain still work, now that the biggest chips in the world, in phones, in laptops, and increasingly in data centers, are built on Arm’s foundation. The answer will determine not just how much Arm collects, but who gets to call themselves an Arm customer on what terms.
