Qualcomm to Buy Modular for $4 Billion

Qualcomm said on 24th June it will acquire AI startup Modular in an all-stock deal valued at nearly $4 billion, a purchase that gives the chipmaker software capable of running AI models across different processors without requiring developers to write code for each chip.

The transaction puts Qualcomm in direct competition with Nvidia’s CUDA platform, the proprietary software layer that has locked millions of developers into Nvidia’s ecosystem and helped drive the company to a $5 trillion valuation. Modular has positioned itself as a neutral alternative, supporting chips from Nvidia, AMD, and others, and its tools are primarily used for inference, the market for running AI models after they have been trained. Inference has become a fresh battleground as Nvidia faces pressure from competitors selling custom chips built for in-house workloads.

Qualcomm expects to issue up to 19.2 million shares to Modular’s equity holders. Its stock fell about 4 percent in late-morning trading after the announcement. CEO Cristiano Amon framed the deal as a bet on developer choice. “We believe the future belongs to developer-friendly, horizontal platforms that can run across diverse compute environments and give customers real choice in how and where they deploy AI,” he said.

The acquisition deepens Qualcomm’s efforts to diversify beyond smartphone chips, which still generate the bulk of its revenue. The company is already planning to ship data centre processors by the end of the year, and it is separately in talks to buy AI chip startup Tenstorrent for $8 billion to $10 billion, according to a report last week by the Information. Emarketer analyst Jacob Bourne said Qualcomm is betting that owning software that extracts more inference efficiency from hardware will help it stake a claim in the data centre market. The Modular deal is expected to close in the second half of 2026.