The dispute between Qualcomm and Arm continues to escalate. The consequences could be devastating for Qualcomm if it loses access to Arm’s chip designs.

Arm and Qualcomm have been fighting over licenses since 2022. There doesn’t seem to be any thought of burying the hatchet for the time being, on the contrary. According to Bloomberg, Arm is said to have threatened to revoke Qualcomm’s license. This won’t happen overnight. Qualcomm will have a 60 day response period.

The reason for the ongoing dispute is a takeover of Nuvia by Qualcomm. Like Qualcomm, Nuvia was a customer of Arm’s chip design and Qualcomm is said to have used its designs when designing the Snapdragon X Elite processor. However, Arm claims that Qualcomm was not allowed to automatically take over Nuvia’s license after the acquisition without first negotiating a new contract with them.

Blow for Qualcomm, also for Arm?

Losing access to the ARM architecture could be a major blow to Qualcomm. The chip manufacturer develops its chips based on designs from Arm. Qualcomm introduced its latest SoC for smartphones this week. Just as Qualcomm is about to rock the PC industry, it would be a very bad time to have to find an alternative to ARM now.

Poor doesn’t seem to benefit much from this either. CEO Rene Haas has great ambitions in the PC industry and wants to capture at least fifty percent of the Windows sales market. The Copilot Plus PCs are a unique opportunity for Arm to put these plans into action: previous attempts with Windows on ARM have had little success. With Apple, Arm has another trump card up its sleeve.

Break or reconciliation?

Qualcomm is not impressed by Arm’s threat. “It’s more of the same from Arm. “More unfounded threats aimed at pressuring a legacy partner, disrupting our industry-leading CPUs and increasing licensing fees, regardless of broad rights under our architectural license,” it said in a response to the Financial Times.

Both sides will meet in court in December. Then it must be clear whether reconciliation is still possible or whether there will be a break. A break is anything but unlikely: Qualcomm’s exclusivity on ARM chips for Windows is about to expire, and there are many parties that want to take over the licenses. Qualcomm, in turn, would like to become less entangled with Arm and develop chips entirely on its own.