For four years the licensing war between Arm and Qualcomm has been watched as a proxy fight over the future of Windows-on-Arm laptops. The retrial in Delaware did not end it: the jury decided in favour of both sides on different claims, heise online reports, leaving both companies without the decisive victory they were seeking.
The dispute began in 2022, when Arm sued Qualcomm over its roughly $1.4 billion acquisition of Nuvia, the chip-design startup founded by former Apple architects. Arm argued that Nuvia's architecture licence could not simply be handed to its new owner; Qualcomm argued that its own licence covered the work. At stake were the Oryon CPU cores that power Qualcomm's Snapdragon X processors — the chips behind a generation of Arm-based Windows laptops.
The first trial, in December 2024, ended inconclusively: jurors found that Qualcomm had not breached parts of the agreement but deadlocked on other claims, which is what produced the retrial now concluded. A split verdict means neither side's central theory was fully accepted — Arm did not establish that the Nuvia licence was misused as broadly as it argued, and Qualcomm did not get the blanket confirmation that its existing licence covers everything it ships.
Practically, little changes in the short term. Qualcomm keeps shipping and designing Arm-compatible silicon; Arm keeps collecting licence revenue from a customer that is also becoming a competitor, as the UK company pushes into chiplet products and its own designs. But legal ambiguity is expensive: every year of litigation is a year in which the terms of a foundational architecture licence remain contested. Both sides have signalled appeals, so the verdict is a milestone, not an endpoint.
The broader stakes are unchanged. Arm's licensing model is the company's economic core, and how freely a licensee may redeploy designs it acquires is a question every chip company with an acquisition strategy is watching. For Qualcomm, the PC push is the growth story meant to reduce dependence on smartphones — and it rests on the very cores the jury has now ruled on, imperfectly.
The final chapter will likely be written by an appeals court rather than a jury.
