Arm Threatens To Nuke Global Mobile Market By Canceling Qualcomm’s Chip Design License – Report

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British chip design Arm Ltd has purportedly thrown a spanner in the global smartphone industry by warning semiconductor design giant Qualcomm that it will cancel Qualcomm's chip design license as part of a dispute between the two that dates back to 2022, reports Bloomberg. Arm refused to comment on the report, with Qualcomm accusing the firm of trying to strong arm it. Arm's chip designs sit at the heart of the multi billion dollar global smartphone industry as its processors are used in smartphones of all performance ranges.

The firm remained confident it would walk away from the termination without facing any disruption as the two firms spar on whether Qualcomm should have renegotiated an acquiree's Arm license following a successful takeover in 2021.

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Qualcomm, Arm Spar Over License To Design Notebook Chips Based On Arm's Design Rules

Qualcomm, which earned $18.8 billion in revenue from smartphone sales during the nine months ending June, has long sought to diversify its business away from smartphones. Any macro induced weakness in consumer spending hits the firm's shares hard, and the stock struggled in 2023, particularly due to weak spending in China.

One way Qualcomm has sought to diversify is by acquiring startup Nuvia in 2021 to try to capture a portion of the laptop market that had recently been disrupted by Apple. Apple launched its M1 processors for the MacBook in 2020 to mark the first processor change to its laptops in 14 years.

Back then, Arm had argued that Qualcomm's Nuvia acquisition meant that the latter's licenses for chip design were ineligible for transfer unless permitted by Arm. Consequently, Arm had sued Qualcomm in court, and today's report from Bloomberg