Arm, Qualcomm legal battle seen disrupting AI-powered PC wave

The new Windows on ARM Copilot+ PC thing, running on Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite and Pro chips, isn't even out the door yet, and we're already dealing with legal proceedings.

But the main conversation among conference attendees was over how acontract disputebetween Arm Holdings and Qualcomm, which work together to make the chips powering these new laptops, could abruptly halt the shipment of new PCs that industry leaders expect will make Microsoft and its partners billions of dollars.

Max A. Cherney at Reuters

The basic gist of the story is as follows. Qualcomm acquired a company named Nuvia, founded by former Apple processor engineers, in order to gain new technology to build its Snapdragon X Elite and Pro chips. Nuvia was planning on developing ARM chips for servers, but after the acquisition, Qualcomm changed their plans and repurposed their technology for use in laptops - the new X chips. ARM claims that Nuvia was only granted a license for server use, and not laptop use. Qualcomm, meanwhile, argued that it has a broad license to use ARM for pretty much anything, and as such, that any possible restrictions Nuvia had are irrelevant.

While this all sounds like very rich corporations having a silly legal slapfight, it could have real consequences. If the legal case goes very, very wrong for Qualcomm, it could halt the sale of devices powered by the Snapdragon X chips well before they're even shipping. I doubt it'll get that far - it rarely does, and there's some big names and big reputations at play here - but it does highlight the absurdity of how the ARM ecosystem works.

Speaking of the ARM ecosystem, Qualcomm isn't the only ARM chip makers dying to break into the PC market. Qualcomm currently has a weird exclusivity agreement with Microsoft where it's the only ARM chip supplier for PCs, but that agreement is running out soon. Another player that's ready to storm this market once that happens is MediaTek, who is also developing a chip geared towards Microsoft's Copilot+ specifications, with a release target of 2025. Let's hope MediaTek will be as forthcoming with Linux support as Qualcomm surprisingly has been, but I have my sincerest doubt.