Arm sues Qualcomm, wants it to “destroy” Nuvia’s pre-acquisition CPU designs

Enlarge / A splash image for Nuvia from the company's blog. (credit: Nuvia)

With its recent Nuvia acquisition, Qualcomm has a real shot at dramatically expanding Arm's market share in the world of servers and Windows laptops. Before Qualcomm can go after Intel, though, the company will have to deal with a lawsuit from... Arm?!

That's right, as Reuters was first to report (case PDF here), Arm is suing Qualcomm over its $1.4 billion acquisition of Nuvia. Arm says that Qualcomm's purchase of Nuvia "caused Nuvia to breach its Arm licenses, leading Arm to terminate those licenses, in turn requiring Qualcomm and Nuvia to stop using and destroy any Arm-based technology developed under the licenses. Undeterred, Qualcomm and Nuvia have continued working on Nuvia's implementation of Arm architecture in violation of Arm's rights as the creator and licensor of its technology." As a result of the license breach, Arm wants "Qualcomm and Nuvia to stop using and to destroy the relevant Nuvia technology."

Nuvia has never sold a product, but it is famously founded by lead engineers from Apple's SoC division. Nuvia's CEO (and now SVP of Qualcomm Engineering), Gerard Williams III, was Apple's chief CPU architect for nearly a decade, including for the M1 SoC. The Nuvia acquisition represents Qualcomm borrowing the Apple playbook and attempting to scale up Arm designs to bigger, typically x86-powered, devices.

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